Category: Stock Market News

Shares of Dollar Tree Inc. rose 1.7% premarket Friday, adding to Thursday’s more than 5% gain, after Raymond James upgraded the stock to strong buy from market perform and assigned it a stock price target of $95, or 21% above its current trading level. Raymond James had downgraded the stock on March, after rating it a strong buy for eight straight years. “What has changed during the past 17-months is DLTR’s valuation has declined to an attractive level following significant stock-price underperformance, while we are increasingly confident on the health of the Dollar Tree banner – and ”modestly” more upbeat on Family Dollar,” he said. Dollar Tree acquired Family Dollar in 2015. The stock had gained 1.7% in 2017 through Thursday, while the S&P 500 has gained 9%.

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Stifel upgraded shares of MercadoLibre Inc. to buy from hold on Friday and said the company has built a strong position in Latin America and will be insulated from competition during the current investment cycle. Describing the e-commerce and payments platform as the Amazon of Latin America, Stifel analysts led by Scott Devitt said MercadoLibre management has succeeded in making the company the biggest online marketplace in the region over the last 17 years. “The company has grown through multiple macroeconomic and geopolitical headwinds,” Devitt wrote in a note. “Active users have grown to over 191mm and the company currently generates an annualized run rate of nearly $11B in GMV (gross merchandise value).” Latin America is still an undeveloped online market with about 2.7% e-commerce penetration, compared with 12% in the U.S. Amazon has a limited presence there excluding Mexico, where it recently launched its Prime service. Amazon’s expansion has had little impact on MercadoLibre’s growth in the region, said the note. “Relative to the size of its potential market, we view MercadoLibre’s $11B market cap as underappreciating the long-term prospects of a market leader backed by multiple favorable secular tailwinds (shift to online retail, mobile, payments, improving infrastructure, and growing middle class consumer) with an attractive asset-light marketplace mode,” said the note. MercadoLibre shares were up 0.8% in premarket trade, and have gained 56% in 2017, while the S&P 500 has gained 8.5%.

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U.S. President Donald Trump will next week embark on a major push to reform tax policy, The Financial Times reported Friday, citing an interview with Gary Cohn, Trump’s chief economic advisor. “He will start being on the road making major addresses justifying the reasoning for tax reform and why we need it in the U.S.,” Cohn was quoted as telling the newspaper. The president will begin a series of tax-focused speeches on Wednesday in Missouri.

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Thailand’s former Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra has fled the country, ahead of a trial ruling on charges of negligence, media reports said Friday. Yingluck failed to turn up in Bangkok’s Supreme Court for the verdict on whether she mismanaged a rice-subsidy program that cost Thailand billions of dollars. If found guilty, she faced up to 10 years in prison and a permanent ban on participation in politics. The charges were brought by the junta that ousted Yingluck, a member of an influential Thai family, in 2014. The court has issued a warrant for Yingluck’s arrest, despite her lawyer’s claim that she was absent due to illness, and has set a new date of Sept. 27 for its verdict, media reports said.

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Uber Technologies Inc. is expected to leave its current headquarters in downtown San Francisco and abandon plans to open a secondary office in Oakland, Calif., in favor of consolidating its offices at a new facility in San Francisco, according to a report late Thursday by the San Francisco Business Journal. Just two years after buying an office building in downtown Oakland, Uber is now seeking to sell it for $123.5 million, according to the Business Journal. Uber at one point planned to have 2,000 to 3,000 workers in the Oakland office, which had been undergoing renovations for the past two years. The Business Journal said Uber intends to consolidate its offices at a new site in San Francisco’s Mission Bay neighborhood, south of downtown, and a block away from the Golden State Warriors’ new basketball arena, scheduled to open in 2019. On Wednesday, Uber reported higher bookings and revenue, but still posted a $645 million second-quarter loss. The company had about $6.6 billion in cash on hand as of March.

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Jefferies analyst Brent Thill downgraded Twitter Inc. Thursday from a buy to a hold and Twitter shares fell more than 1% after hours. While President Donald J. Trump’s tweets make daily headlines, Thill and his team believe that Facebook Inc. will be a “clear winner” in social media. In short, Twitter’s users are engaging more with its platform but the company is having difficulty translating that into revenue, and finding growth. Twitter too will lag behind other advertising plays such as Alphabet Inc.’s Google unit and Snap Inc. , especially when it comes to digital video, Thill wrote in the note. Snap is up 0.5% after hours. Video, Thill says is, “the largest opportunity across social for 2018 to 2020” and Twitter’s product isn’t much different. Twitter stock has gained 3.6% year-to-date, while the S&P 500 index has gained 8.9%.

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Quintiles IMS Holdings Inc. and SBA Communications Corp. will join the S&P 500 Index , S&P Dow Jones Indices said late Thursday. Quintiles will replace Whole Foods Markets Inc. which was acquired by Amazon.com Inc. , on Aug. 29. On Sept. 1, SBA will replace DuPont , which is being merged with Dow Chemical Co. and will become DowDuPont Inc. under the ticker symbol “DWDP.” Shares of Quintiles rose 3.5% and SBA shares advanced 3.3% after hours.

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Adamas Pharmaceuticals Inc. shares soared after the drug maker received Food and Drug Administration approval for a one-of-a-kind treatment for the involuntary movements associated with Parkinson’s disease. Adamas shares jumped 36% to $19.30 on heavy volume after hours. The company said the FDA approved Gocovri for the treatment of dyskinesia, or the abnormal or involuntary movements, associated with Parkinson’s, the only such FDA drug approved for this indication. Adamas expects to roll out Gocovri in the fourth quarter with the full backing of its sales force by January.

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Pure Storage Inc. announced a change at the top along with a slightly more optimistic annual forecast Thursday afternoon, and shares gained in late trading. The enterprise flash-storage company said that Chief Executive Scott Dietzen, who led Pure Storage through its 2015 initial public offering, would step down from the CEO role and transition to chairman. He will be replaced by Charles Giancarlo, previously an executive at Silver Lake Partners and Cisco Systems Inc. , effective immediately. Pure Storage also revealed its earnings for the second quarter and increased its forecast for full-year revenue to a level that suggests the company could hit $1 billion in annual sales for the first time. The company reported a net loss of $61.7 million, or 29 cents a share, on revenue of $224.5 million, up 38% from $163.2 million in the year-ago quarter. After adjusting for stock-based compensation and other effects, Pure Storage claimed a loss of 11 cents a share after reporting adjusted quarterly losses of 16 cents a share a year ago. Analysts on average expected an adjusted loss of 5 cents a share on sales of $218.1 million. Pure Storage also added $10 million to the bottom of its projected revenue range for the full year, which is now $985 million to $1.025 billion. Pure Storage shares gained more than 4% in after-hours actions following the report, after closing the regular session with a 0.8% decline at $12.56.

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Shares of GameStop Corp. fell more than 6% late Thursday after the specialty retailer missed quarterly earnings expectations and showed a decline in comparable-store sales in the U.S. GameStop said it earned $22.2 million, or 22 cents a share, in the second quarter, compared with $27.9 million, or 27 cents a share, in the year-ago period. Adjusted for one-time items, GameStop earned $14.9 million, or 15 cents a share, in the quarter, compared with $27.9 million, or 27 cents a share, in the prior-year quarter. Revenue rose to $1.69 billion, from $1.63 billion a year ago, and comparable-store sales rose 1.9% as an increase of 9.8% in international sales offset a 1.4% fall in the U.S. Analysts polled by FactSet had expected adjusted earnings of 18 cents a share on sales of $1.64 billion. The shares ended the regular trading session up 1.4%.

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