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Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Judge Questions $20 Million Payout to AMR CEO

A bankruptcy judge said it would be "inappropriate" to approve a $20 million exit package for the outgoing chief executive of American Airlines parent AMR Corp., calling it his only "hang-up" as he cleared the way for a merger with US Airways Group Inc.

U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Sean Lane on Wednesday granted American's request to send the merger plan to the airline's creditors for a vote, one of the final steps before the Forth Worth, Texas airline can emerge from bankruptcy proceedings and combine with US Airways.

AMR CEO Tom Horton, though, will have to wait for approval of the ...

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Monday, April 29, 2013

Messaging Apps Threaten Tech Giants

On a recent Saturday, Johan Dijkland, a 23-year-old student in Emmen, Netherlands, opened a free messaging app called Line on his iPhone. Then he tapped on a virtual sticker of a sleepy panda with a "good night" speech bubble and pressed send to a friend.

A fast-growing crowd of mobile messaging apps with funny names like Viber, WhatsApp, WeChat and KakaoTalk is rankling technology giants from Silicon Valley to Seoul. Evelyn Rusli and Viber CEO Talmon Marco join digits. Photo: Viber.

How big of a money maker are apps? What country's GDP is the size of the global app economy? How does app use compare to TV in terms of time spent per day? WSJ's Jason Bellini has answers.

With that action, Mr. Dijkland's text joined the tens of billions of messages that are processed every day from a fast-growing crowd of mobile messaging apps.

These messaging apps—with funny names like WhatsApp, WeChat and KakaoTalk—have become an indispensable form of communication for hundreds of millions of people world-wide.

They are also rankling technology giants from Silicon Valley to Seoul. That is because when users like Mr. Dijkland send messages using Line, his mobile carrier Vodafone Group PLC and iPhone maker Apple Inc. don't directly profit from the interaction.

The Wall Street Journal Messaging apps like WhatsApp have become an indispensable form of communication for hundreds of millions of people world-wide.

And as Mr. Dijkland's use of the free app Line grows—he estimates he spends three to four hours a day on Line sending dozens of messages and stickers—his time using other conversational channels such as social network Facebook Inc. has declined.

"On Line you have conversations, so you react by the minute," said Mr. Dijkland, who started using Line five months ago. "On Facebook you just look at the news feed and after that, there's not more to see."

Line, which is especially popular in Japan, has been downloaded more than 110 million times, said Jeanie Han, CEO of Line USA. The app, and others like it available for download, are rapidly replacing the fixtures on phones from BlackBerry, Apple and others.

Texting apps are especially costing wireless carriers, which for years relied on the services for the bulk of their revenue.

A survey shows that app creators are, on average, young males and few make much money.

The Wall Street Journal

Business leaders, athletes and entertainers share their smartphone and tablet apps for work and play.

By some estimates a single text, which may cost as much as 20 cents to send or receive, costs the carriers themselves just one-hundredth of a cent. The rise of texting apps has taken away $23 billion in revenue from carriers as of the end of 2012, according to market research firm Ovum.

Matt Murphy, a venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers who has invested in voice and text messaging service textPlus Inc., said mobile messaging has now become people's "primary social graph." He added, "Apps are taking that audience and turning that into something bigger."

As a result, companies including Facebook, Deutsche Telekom AG and Samsung Electronics Corp. are making a land grab into the messaging app market.

Facebook acquired mobile messaging startup Beluga in 2011 and recently expressed interest in buying WhatsApp Inc.—a company that has also been approached by Google and Tencent Holdings Ltd., people familiar with the matter said. The company, which consistently appears near the top of Apple's list of top paid mobile apps, wasn't interested in selling.

Last February, Deutsche Telekom invested $7.5 million in messaging app Pinger. SK Telecom Co., South Korea's largest mobile carrier, also last year purchased MadSmart, maker of popular messaging app TicToc. And in October, Yahoo Japan Corp. purchased a 50% stake of Kakao Corp.'s Japanese subsidiary.

Samsung, which debuted its own messaging app called ChatOn in late 2011, has reached out to mobile messaging startups including MessageMe, for possible partnerships, said people with knowledge of the matter. The handset maker, according to one person close to the company, is trying to bulk up on mobile software as mobile becomes a larger portion of its revenue.

Meanwhile, social games maker Zynga Inc., which has a partnership with WeChat parent Tencent, has reached out to Kakao and others to promote its games in the messaging apps, said people familiar with the company. Over the long term, Zynga also plans to build its own unified messaging service for its games network, these people said.

"This is a market where everyone is talking to everyone," said Talmon Marco, chief executive of Viber, based in Cyprus. He said his messaging company—which has more than 175 million subscribers, more than triple from a year ago—recently signed with Indonesian carrier AXIS Telekom Indonesia to be the preferred messaging app on the network and plans to announce another half dozen or so carrier partnerships in the next few months. Mr. Marco said Viber is also talking to games companies about promoting games on its platform.

Big tech companies acknowledge that mobile messaging is a top priority. Peter Deng, Facebook's director of product management who handles communication applications, said messaging apps weren't a big focus two years ago—but he now spends about 75% of his time thinking about mobile messaging "because it's important to the people we serve."

Facebook is now playing catch-up in mobile messaging. The company released a stand-alone messaging app in late 2011 and only started allowing people to sign up for a Facebook messenger account with their phone number last year.

More recently, Facebook has stapled on new features to its messaging app, like calling, voice mail and impermanent texts. It plans to accelerate product releases for its messaging services, Mr. Deng said.

Messaging apps, known as "over-the-top" apps because consumers don't pay carriers directly for the services, typically go beyond plain-vanilla text messaging with features such as voice notes, camera applications, access to games and virtual stickers that are popular among teens and young adults.

The juggernaut of messaging apps is widely considered to be WhatsApp, based in Mountain View, Calif., and founded in 2009. In January, WhatsApp said it processed 18 billion messages a day, up from 10 billion five months earlier, the company has said. The app has hundreds of millions of users, with more than 100 million downloads on Google's Android phone alone.

Tencent's WeChat, meanwhile, said it crossed 300 million subscribers in January.

But messaging apps face challenges in converting their popularity into significant revenue. WhatsApp has no advertising and charges its users $1 a year. It also has brokered lucrative arrangements with carriers—some, for instance, will sell users special WhatsApp packages that offers unlimited data through WhatsApp for a small fee per month.

Kakao, with about 82 million subscribers, takes a kitchen sink approach to making money, generating revenue from sales of stickers, games, advertising and an e-commerce store where users can buy Starbucks credit or $1,000 diamond necklaces.

Kakao co-CEO Sirgoo Lee said his Seoul-based messaging app makes roughly half its money from promoting mobile games of third-party publishers. It splits games revenue with platform providers like Apple and the game makers themselves, keeping about 20%. Since August, Kakao has grown games revenue from $500,000 a month to $4 million a month, he said.

"We don't know exactly what will work, but we're constantly experimenting," he said.

NHN Corp.'s Line also makes most of its money through sales of virtual goods in games and special stickers, which it sells for $1.99 a set.

Since late last year, Ms. Han said she has been inundated by calls from games companies and mobile carriers pitching revenue-sharing deals, including offers to be preinstalled on smartphones. Buyers are also knocking on her door, but she said Line doesn't need to sell because it is backed by a public South Korean company and has plenty of capital and momentum.

"I've had people call me about it, but right now my answer is no," she said.

—Greg Bensinger contributed to this article.

Write to Evelyn Rusli at evelyn.rusli@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared March 28, 2013, on page B1 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: IMHO: TXT MSGS R SO OVER.


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Sunday, April 28, 2013

Michael Dell Met With Blackstone

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Saturday, April 27, 2013

Nuclear-Energy Giant Urenco Seeks Suitors

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Friday, April 26, 2013

Panasonic to Pare Unprofitable Units

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Thursday, April 25, 2013

Potty Drama: Competing to Improve Plane Toilets

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Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Restaurant Chains Cut Health-Law Tabs

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Tuesday, April 23, 2013

RIM Unwraps Risky Phone Plan

TORONTO—Research In Motion Ltd. reported its second consecutive quarterly profit and decent sales for its new flagship phone Thursday, but perhaps the biggest revelation from its chief executive was a risky strategy to revive the company.

The plan: Roll out a portfolio of mixed-price phones to help shore up the company's dwindling smartphone-market share and the expected declines in service-fee revenue.

Bloomberg News At a mall in Jakarta, customers purchase the new BlackBerry Z10 on March 15, the first day it was available.

With cost cutting and layoffs mostly done, RIM CEO Thorsten Heins said he has been encouraged so far with the rollout of the BlackBerry Z10, the first phone running off RIM's new operating system.

With only a month of sales from a limited number of markets, it is still far from clear that launch is a success.

See a side-by-side comparison of the specifications of recent phones, including the BlackBerry Z10.

But Mr. Heins said he is already turning his attention to a series of new, as-yet-unseen products due out later in RIM's fiscal year—signaling he is eager to go after several different markets with low- and midprice versions of the new phones.

The shift, which Mr. Heins has alluded to in the past, appears to be an acknowledgment that no matter how big a hit the Z10 may prove, the BlackBerry isn't likely to compete in the same league any time soon with market leaders Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co.

"I don't think anyone expects BlackBerry to dominate like they once did," said Al Hilwa, an analyst at industry consultancy IDC. "But the company can survive and even prosper with a microbrew of a platform, with 5% to 10% market share, if it can execute well and at the right scale."

Investors are looking for more proof. RIM's shares closed down 0.8% to $14.45 on Thursday after rising as much as 10% immediately after the earnings release in the morning.

See a timeline of Research In Motion.

RIM's strategy comes with risks. By touting future rollouts in the midst of a just-begun Z10 launch, Mr. Heins is gambling that RIM can play in many different markets at once, something it has done with only limited success in the past.

And Thursday's earnings underscored some of the big challenges still facing RIM.

BlackBerry subscribers world-wide fell by about three million to 76 million, the steepest three-month drop for RIM.

The company attributed the subscriber fall largely to declines in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, though it didn't provide details.

European Pressphoto Agency CEO Thorsten Heins unveiled the new BlackBerry Z10 smartphone for the German market in Cologne in February.

Mr. Heins gave few details about the new products he envisioned, but said he expected more rollouts in the company's current fiscal year, which began earlier this month.

"We're building a portfolio in this fiscal year, so you will see us getting into the market with various products," Mr. Heins said on a conference call with analysts Thursday.

Aside from selling phones, one of RIM's key sources of cash in recent years has been service fees generated by BlackBerry users and carriers. Mr. Heins said those fees, which represent more than one-third of RIM's revenue, fell in the "single digits" in the quarter.

Mr. Heins said he expected the service fees to decline as the company works with carriers, who are eager to reduce those payments now that RIM's command of the smartphone market—once a dominant one—has crumbled.

On Thursday, Mr. Heins hinted at some new possibilities for generating service revenue, including leveraging the company's popular BlackBerry messenger service and its security- and business-focused offerings. But he stopped short of any specifics.

"The composition of our services revenue model is evolving, and you will hear more about these services as they are introduced," Mr. Heins said. "But make no mistake about it. We plan to stay in the services business, and we're actively building and implementing strategies to support these initiatives in the future."

The push for new products and service fees comes as RIM shows some early signs of success with its latest device, the first phone to run off its new operating system.

Since the launch of the Z10 a month ago in markets like the U.K., Canada and India, RIM has been running a conservative inventory management strategy for the phone. The company says it is selling through up to three quarters of the phones it is shipped. That is boosted cash flow, but it has also led to lack of product in some markets, and forced RIM to ramp up production to meet demand.

RIM said it shipped six million smartphones during the quarter, including about one million Z10s.

That is a number that didn't blow analysts away but was respectable enough amid the staggered launch to suggest the phone—which has been repeatedly delayed—may be well received after all.

The Z10 came late to the U.S.—it launched at AT&T Inc. stores last week and only became available on Verizon Wireless' network Thursday—and marketing support from carriers has been spotty. The U.S. launch came too late to be included on Thursday's earnings.

RIM says its own U.S. ad campaign, and campaigns from the carriers in support of the phone, are just now ramping up. It said it expects marketing spending to ratchet up 50% in the current quarter.

The next phone to be rolled out is the Q10, a keyboard-equipped phone that RIM says is on track for an April launch in some markets and is winding its way through the carrier testing process in 20 countries. The phone is expected in the U.S. in May.

RIM also said Thursday that one of its founders and its former, longtime co-chief executive, Mike Lazaridis, would step down from the board. That ends Mr. Lazaridis' formal ties to RIM, which go back about 30 years to when he started the company with a loan from his parents.

Mr. Lazaridis said, however, he had no plans to sell down his sizable RIM holdings, which amounts to about 5.7% of the company's shares.

Write to Will Connors at william.connors@wsj.com


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Monday, April 22, 2013

Sara Lee Coffee Spinoff Gets $9.7 Billion Offer

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Sunday, April 21, 2013

T-Mobile's MetroPCS Deal Is Threatened

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Saturday, April 20, 2013

US Airways CEO Undecided on American's New Branding

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Friday, April 19, 2013

Barbara Walters to Leave 'The View'

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Thursday, April 18, 2013

CBS Buys Half of TV Guide

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Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Comcast Scores Court Victory

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Data Don't Add Up for Thomson Reuters

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Monday, April 15, 2013

Leighton Sells Telecommunications Assets

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Sunday, April 14, 2013

NBC, Anderson Cooper Held Brief Talks

NBC had a brief conversation with Anderson Cooper's representatives about the CNN anchor's interest in moving to the broadcast network, including potentially a role on NBC's "Today" show in the future, say people familiar with the situation.


Any "Today" role would have been after anchor Matt Lauer leaves the show, one of the people said. Mr. Lauer has a contract that runs until 2015.

GLAAD/Getty Images NBC spoke briefly with CNN's Anderson Cooper—shown with Madonna earlier this month in New York—about a switch to the broadcast network.


The talks didn't get very far. A person familiar with Mr. Cooper's thinking said that he wasn't interested in the job. NBC said Wednesday that it wasn't looking to replace Mr. Lauer. "As we've said before, Matt is the best in the business," NBC News executive Alexandra Wallace said. "We want him in the Today show anchor chair for many years to come."


A CNN spokeswoman didn't return calls.


Still, the fact that a possible role on the Today show was discussed, however briefly, suggests the network is contemplating a future without Mr. Lauer, who has long been considered a major draw for the morning show.


"Today" has been under pressure since losing its 16-year lead in the morning television ratings race last year to ABC's "Good Morning America." Critics blamed a lack of chemistry between Mr. Lauer and his co-anchor Ann Curry, who last summer was moved off the show. She was succeeded by Savannah Guthrie.


For the season to date, total viewers at "Today" averaged 4.64 million, while "Good Morning America" drew an average of 5.24 million viewers, according to Nielsen data provided by NBC. "Today" trails its rival in the 25-54 age group, which it considers the core audience, by a smaller amount.


There are signs advertisers have taken notice. For the two hour block before 9 a.m., when "Today" competes with GMA, the NBC show's ad revenue rose 2.6% to $497.3 million last year from 2011, while GMA's ad revenue rose 6.8% to $318.5 million, according to Kantar Media, a unit of WPP PLC. "Today" posted stronger growth in the post 9-a.m. segment.


The latest uproar will likely unnerve advertisers further, one media buyer said. "When ratings and talent begin to waver at a franchise that has had such a long, consistent history of success and support from advertisers...if you're not nervous then you're not paying attention," said Kris Magel, director of national broadcast at Initiative, an ad buying firm owned by Interpublic Group of Cos.


The revelations about NBC's possible interest in Mr. Cooper, reported earlier by Deadline.com, come at a tumultuous time for NBC, a unit of Comcast Corp. Last week news broke that NBC was working on a transition in its late night schedule. The network has committed to comic Jimmy Fallon, who will succeed Jay Leno, host of the Tonight Show, when Mr. Leno steps down. Mr. Leno's contract is up next year.


Meanwhile NBC continues to struggle in prime time. After a strong start, its audience slumped midway through the season after Sunday Night Football ended and two other popular shows, "The Voice" and "Revolution," went on a break. For the week ending March 24, NBC was in third place among major networks, ahead of News Corp .'s Fox in total viewers, according to Nielsen. "The Voice" returned on Monday night, however, and preliminary ratings suggest the show could help lift NBC through the end of the season. News Corp. also owns The Wall Street Journal.

—Suzanne Vranica contributed to this article.

Write to Christopher S. Stewart at christopher.stewart@wsj.com and William Launder at william.launder@dowjones.com

A version of this article appeared March 28, 2013, on page B3 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: NBC, Cooper Held Talks.


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Saturday, April 13, 2013

New Flipboard: News and Posts Handpicked and Shared

Flipboard has allowed smart phone and tablet users to aggregate digital content for a while, but it now allows you to publish your own digital magazines without any design skills. Walt Mossberg takes a look at version 2.0. (Photo: Flipboard, Inc.)

One of the best ways of following topics that are interesting to you is Flipboard, a popular app for Apple and Android mobile devices that automatically turns social-network posts and news from online publications, into beautiful, magazine-like pages you "flip" through by swiping.

Now, a new second generation of Flipboard, out Tuesday, is extending the app so it allows users to create and share their own handsome digital magazines with a few clicks and without any design talent required. If you make your magazine public, anyone with Flipboard, which is a free app, can read it and comment on it.

Walt Mossberg/ The Wall Street Journal Walt Mossberg's Flipboard magazine on the American Revolution.

I've been testing this new version of Flipboard, which has some other improved features, over the past week or so, on several iPads and an iPhone. My verdict is the new features make a great mobile app even better. There are some limitations to the new capabilities, but they make your mobile device more personal and more of a creative tool, rather than just a means of consumption. For now, the new version is only available for Apple's devices, but an Android edition is in the works.

The original Flipboard, which is produced by a small, private Silicon Valley company of the same name, was aimed at helping people wade through the welter of information on social networks and the Web, by allowing them to corral posts on popular topics like, say, baking or basketball, into attractive collections. The company says that capability has earned it 50 million registered users and a smaller, but active, core group of millions who use it daily.

I have long used Flipboard to follow tech and political news, or to leaf through everything posted on Twitter or Facebook by particular people or sites. These collections would update as new posts meeting the criteria appeared. If I had a collection about, say, the economy or smartphones, based on tweets on those subjects, it would stay current, showing me automatically any Web pages referenced within those tweets.

[image] Flipboard Above, one person's Flipboard page with personal magazines and subscriptions.

With the new personal magazine feature, however, I can make my own Flipboard-hosted publications on particular topics of interest, handpicking the posts or articles I want to include, rather than relying on feeds or algorithms. And it's easy to do. When you find a post, video or article you want to include in your magazine, you just click a plus button next to it, choose which of your magazines to "flip it" into and it appears in that magazine. The magazine only updates when you decide to update it with a new article, photo or video. The original creators are credited.

During my testing, I made five magazines, some public and some private. Since these were just for testing, they weren't carefully created. But I was impressed by how quickly I could produce them and how nicely Flipboard laid them out, with handsome cover photos, bold headlines and a logical arrangement of photos and articles.

I made public magazines on the American Revolution, Ancient Wonders, the Boston Red Sox and my favorite current TV dramas. I also made a private magazine to store content I wanted to read later.

This process is greatly helped by a much-enhanced search feature in Flipboard, which finds items both in Flipboard itself and in a long list of social networks and sites, such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube, Instagram, Flickr, Tumblr and streams of content, called RSS feeds, produced by various sites.

You can add content to your magazines using a special bookmark for most browsers on PCs or Macs. When you see something on the Web you'd like in one of your magazines, click this bookmark and a small Flipboard window opens with thumbnails of your magazines, allowing you to add the item. Alas, this bookmark is very difficult to install on the browsers on the iPad and iPhone.

There's a new Notifications feature that tells you when people have liked or commented on your magazines. A "By Our Readers" feature suggests public magazines the Flipboard staff considers outstanding.

Publishers are making use of the new magazine feature in Flipboard. Esquire has created a magazine that's a collection of its interviews and Rolling Stone has published a Flipboard magazine collecting some of its articles on the Beatles.

If you find a magazine you like, you can subscribe to it, for easy and continued access, or share a link to it via Twitter, Facebook or email. If somebody who has Flipboard wants to view the magazine, it'll automatically open. Otherwise, the link will take a person to a Web page with instructions on how to get Flipboard.

Unfortunately, what you can't do is to edit your magazine much, or add original or local content to it. You can't rearrange articles, or create your own text articles, or add photos or videos that live only on your iPad or iPhone. You also can't rearrange articles. Because Flipboard is so oriented to pulling in content from online sources, to use one of your own photos or videos in your own magazine, you'd have to first post it to a site like Flickr. To use an article you write for your own magazine, you'd have to first post it online.

The only tweaking you can do directly is to change the cover picture, which is typically drawn from the most recent article you include that has a photo; remove an item; create and change the title and a short description of the magazine; and change its status between publicly visible or private.

You also can't charge for your magazines or sell ads in them, though any ads embedded in the content you include would travel with that content into your magazine.

Flipboard says it expects to add some of these features, like the ability to use photos and videos stored on your device, in updates.

Overall, Flipboard's new personal magazines are a very good addition to a very good app.

—Find all of Walt Mossberg's columns and videos at the All Things Digital website, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com. A version of this article appeared March 27, 2013, on page D1 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: New Flipboard: News, Posts Handpicked And Shared.


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Friday, April 12, 2013

Oh, My! That Dirty Book Has Sold 70 Million Copies

Everybody knows sex sells. Now, in book-publishing circles, it's a bit clearer exactly how much.

E.L. James's "Fifty Shades" erotic trilogy sold more than 70 million copies in print, audio and e-book editions in English, German and Spanish from March through December, according to Bertelsmann SE & Co., parent of the books' publisher Random House. The first of the books was published in the ...

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Thursday, April 11, 2013

Swartz to Be New Hearst CEO

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Wednesday, April 10, 2013

When the Box Says 'Protein,' Shoppers Say 'I'll Take It'

When General Mills Inc. wanted to introduce two new bars to its stable of snacks, it chose the same word to make them sell: protein.

Protein is the buzzword that is helping sell many kinds of foods. Food companies are placing more prominent protein labels on packaging and adding protein to such products as drinks, bars and cereals.

"It's one of those rare things that has a lot of different meanings to a lot of different people and they are all positive," says Barry Calpino, vice president of breakthrough innovation for Kraft Foods Group Inc., sellers of products from Velveeta ...

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Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Citi Sails Back Into 'Synthetic' Securities

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Monday, April 8, 2013

Copper Settles at Seven-Month Low

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Sunday, April 7, 2013

Former Morgan Keegan Fund Directors to Settle With SEC

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Saturday, April 6, 2013

Frozen-Food Maker Pinnacle Has Hot Start

Shares of frozen-food company Pinnacle Foods Inc. had a hot start in their public-trading debut, revealing investors' healthy appetite for a stable company poised to pay a hefty dividend.


Shares opened at $22.26 Thursday on the New York Stock Exchange, up 11% from their initial-public-offering price of $20.


The company and stockholders sold 29 million shares, which priced Wednesday night at $20, at the high end of an expected $18-to-$20 range, valuing the offering at $580 million.


The Parsippany, N.J.-based maker of Vlasic pickles and Celeste pizza was seen as a test of how much investors would be willing to pay for a company that offers a hefty dividend but also comes saddled with debt and limited prospects for growth.


Pinnacle said in its prospectus that it is targeting an 18-cent quarterly dividend, which would imply a 3.6% annual yield based on the offer price. That compares with a 2.2% dividend yield on stocks in the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index.


The company's sales, meanwhile, have been mostly flat. At the end of last year, its total debt stood at $2.1 billion, or about five times 2012's adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization.


With the Federal Reserve keeping interest rates extremely low, high-dividend-paying stocks have been commanding a premium from investors seeking to boost income generated by their portfolios.


Pinnacle, which is backed by Blackstone Group LP, is the latest in a string of deals brought to market this year by private-equity firms. Blackstone bought Pinnacle for $2.16 billion in 2007. It added Birds Eye Foods Inc. in 2009 with a $1.3 billion deal.


Barclays PLC and Bank of America Corp. served as the deal's primary underwriters.


Write to Matt Jarzemsky at matthew.jarzemsky@dowjones.com


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Friday, April 5, 2013

Income Sinkhole Threatens Consumer Spending

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Thursday, April 4, 2013

Judge Balks at SAC Settlement

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Wednesday, April 3, 2013

S&P 500 Joins the Record-High Party, Fashionably Late

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Tuesday, April 2, 2013

VIX 'Fear Gauge' Lures Buyers Just in Case

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Thursday, March 28, 2013

S&P 500 Closes In on Record

After weeks of false starts, the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index finally broke a six-year-old closing high to mark a new all-time new record.

The push to record territory came in midmorning trading, as the S&P 500 broke past its previous record close of 1565.15 on Oct. 9, 2007.

The S&P 500 gained 6.34 points, or 0.4%, to 1569. The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 52.38 points, or 0.4%, to 14578.54, also finishing the quarter at a new closing record. The Nasdaq Composite index tacked on 11.00 points, or 0.3%, to 3267.52.

The S&P 500 had flirted with its closing record for two weeks before finally vaulting over that level Thursday. It had come within five points of the closing high in seven of the past 10 sessions.

The Standard & Poor's 500-stock index closed at a new record, marking a key milestone after a long slog back from financial-crisis lows. Stephen Wood of Russell Investments gives his analysis. Photo: Getty Images.

"The market has been trying and trying, and we finally crossed the line," said Quincy Krosby, a market strategist at Prudential Financial, which manages roughly $1 trillion in assets. "Having the Dow reaching new highs was good, but the S&P 500 is broader, it's bigger… it's an important message for investors."

The S&P 500 still remains just off its all-time intraday high of 1576.09 on Oct. 11, 2007. After hitting that peak more than five years ago, the benchmark shed more than half its value during the financial crisis, sinking to a close of 676.53 on March 9, 2009. Its market capitalization was $5.9 trillion at the 2009 low.

[image] Reuters Traders work on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday, when the S&P 500 notched a new closing record.

Richard E. Sylla, financial historian and professor of economics at NYU's Stern School of Business, discusses the likelihood of a series of markets highs, the impact of the Fed's ability to keep interest rates down, and the tendency for investors to buy high and sell low, in a big interview with WSJ's Jason Zweig.

Since then, it has climbed steadily higher on the back of rising corporate earnings by U.S. companies. Its market capitalization has recovered to reach nearly $14 trillion. The three best performers in that time have been Wyndham Worldwide, CBS Corp. and Tenet Healthcare .

The final leg higher for the S&P 500, a 10% rise in the first three months of this year, came despite a renewed flare-up of the euro-zone debt crisis. But as troubled euro-zone member Cyprus reopened its banks Thursday, there was little sense of panic, which calmed investor nerves and set the stage for the index's push into record territory.

Gordon Charlop, managing director at Rosenblatt Securities on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, said of the record, "There seemed to be an air of inevitability to this. We're here on the back of stimulus, we're here on the back of no real alternatives for investors."

"Until there is a significant paradigm shift that will cause a reversal, the bulls have the swagger," he said.

The latest benchmark record caps a strong first quarter for stocks. The blue chips, which hit a new high on March 5, notched their best first quarter since 1998, adding more than 11%. The S&P 500 was up 10% for the quarter. While the S&P 500's quarterly gains were outpaced by last year's 12% first-quarter gain, the index marked its first five-month win streak since 2009.

Investors had been worried that the reopening of banks in Cyprus, after being closed for nearly two weeks amid negotiations on a bailout package, could lead to a widespread run on deposits. But while crowds did gather outside of banks before they reopened, investors were relieved to see there was little sign of panic.

"Banks in Cyprus are seeing more of a jog than any kind of run," said Jeffrey Kleintop, chief market strategist for LPL Financial.

But a reading on manufacturing in the Chicago area weighed on stocks, sparking a brief turn lower after a report on activity in March came in below expectations. A disappointing weekly reading on the labor market also offset the optimism.

European markets traded mostly higher, with the Stoxx Europe 600 gaining 0.5%, as the relative calm in Cyprus overshadowed mixed data out of Germany.

The number of jobless Germans rose 13,000 in March versus expectations of an unchanged reading, but February retail sales increased 0.4% on the month compared with expectations of a 0.6% decline. Germany's DAX 30 index tacked on 0.1%.

Meanwhile, Asian markets slumped, highlighted by a 2.8% tumble in China's Shanghai Composite after the country's banking regulator unveiled new controls on popular wealth-management products. Japan's Nikkei Stock Average shed 1.3% and Australia's S&P ASX 200 gave up 0.6%.

May crude-oil futures added 0.7% to $97.23 a barrel, while gold futures fell 0.7% to $1,594.80 a troy ounce. The dollar slipped against both the euro and the yen. Demand for Treasurys fell, with the yield on the benchmark 10-year note rising to 1.851%.

In corporate news, Research In Motion reversed early gains to post losses in late trading after the BlackBerry maker reported a surprise fourth-quarter profit, but its revenue missed estimates and the company said it lost about three million subscribers during the quarter.

Discount retailer Five Below slid after the company forecast weak full-year results.

—Chris Dieterich and Jonathan Cheng contributed to this article.

Write to Alexandra Scaggs at alexandra.scaggs@dowjones.com


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