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New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said it has reached a record $42 million settlement with Bank of America Merrill Lynch over a fraudulent “masking” scheme in the bank’s electronic trading division. The bank told customers it was executing their orders in-house, but instead was actually routing them to ELPs (electronic liquidity providers), like Citadel, Two Sigma, Knight and others. The bank “masked” the deals by replacing the identity of the ELP with a code that indicated it was done by BofAML. “Bank of America Merrill Lynch went to astonishing lengths to defraud its own institutional clients about who was seeing and filling their orders, who was trading in its dark pool, and the capabilities of its electronic trading services,” Schneiderman said in a statement. The AG’s office found the bank had engaged in the practice starting in 2008, and that more than 16 million client orders were affected. Bank of America shares were slightly higher Friday, and have gained 32% in the last 12 months, while the S&P 500 has gained 13%.

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The first-ever trade in China-based Sunlands Online Education Group’s stock was at $13.10 on the NYSE, or 14% above the $11.50 initial-public-offering price. The first trade was made at 10:33 a.m. ET, for 965,970 shares, according to FactSet. The provider of post-secondary and professional education services company’s IPO priced late Thursday at the low end of the expected range of $11.50 to $13.50 a share, to raise $149.5 million, before options granted to underwriters. The stock was last up 20% at $13.77, and has traded in a range of $12.77 to $13.80 since the open. Sunlands’s IPO comes at a time when the Renaissance IPO ETF has gained 2.1% over the past three months and the S&P 500 has lost 1.3%.

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Shares of Nutanix Inc. are down 5.5% in Friday trading after the stock was removed from the Conviction Buy list at Goldman Sachs. Analyst Rod Hall cited the sharp rise in Nutanix’s stock since the company reported earnings on March 1. Shares were up 46% since then as of Thursday’s close, versus a 1% drop for the S&P 500 . Hall kept his buy rating on shares and remains upbeat about the company’s growth potential. “We continue to believe that the company is in the early innings of the transition toward a software-centric business model, which should drive upside in both revenue… and gross margins,” he wrote. “Further, we view the company’s longer-term vision toward becoming an enterprise hybrid cloud platform as compelling.” Goldman Sachs added Nutanix to its conviction list in July 2017. Shares are up 162% over the past 12 months, compared with a 13% gain for the S&P 500.

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Apple Inc. plans to announce lower-cost iPads and education software next week, according to Bloomberg, which cites several people familiar with the matter. The company is holding an education event in Chicago on March 27. Apple is reportedly interested in winning back share of the education market, as cheaper devices such as Alphabet Inc.’s Chromebooks and Microsoft Corp. tablets maintain momentum in schools. Apple is also working on a cheaper MacBook, Bloomberg said, but that likely won’t be ready in time for the March event. Apple shares are down 0.5% in Friday morning trading. The stock is up 20% over the past 12 months, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average has gained 16%.

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Shares of New York & Co. soared 23% in morning trade Friday, enough to make them the biggest gainer on the NYSE, after the women’s fashion retailer reported upbeat fiscal fourth-quarter results. The company reported late Thursday that it swung to a profit $4.7 million, or 7 cents a share, from a loss of $10.0 million, or 16 cents a share, in the same period a year ago, that revenue rose to $278.7 million from $266.3 million and that same-store sales grew 3.0%. Chief Executive Gregory Scott said on the post-earnings conference call that the e-commerce business had more than doubled in the past three years, and now represents 31% of total volume, according to a transcript provided by FactSet. The company said it closed 27 stores during the quarter, and expects to close 35 to 40 stores in 2018. The stock has now run up 72% over the past 12 months, while the SPDR S&P Retail ETF has gained 5.7% and the S&P 500 has rallied 13%.

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U.S. stock benchmarks attempted to bounce back on Friday, a day after equities were routed after the Trump administration said it would impose tariffs on tens of billions of dollars of Chinese imports on top of duties on steel and aluminum imports, raising fears of a trade war. China’s commerce ministry retaliated soon after by announcing it would levy tariffs against $3 billion of U.S. goods. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 130 points, or 0.6%, at 24,097 the S&P 500 index advanced 0.4% at 2,655, while the Nasdaq Composite Index gained 0.3% at 7,190. In economic reports, durable-goods orders jumped 3.1% in February, reversing a big drop at the start of the year and posting the largest gain since last summer. In corporate news, Dropbox Inc. s: DBX] is set to make its debut on Friday. The company priced its initial public offering at $21 a share late Thursday, above its expected range, according to The Wall Street Journal. Adding to some of the volatility in the market, President Donald Trump said early Friday [l: via Twitter|https://www.marketwatch.com/story/trump-says-hes-considering-vetoing-spending-bill-over-border-wall-daca-2018-03-23] that he is considering vetoing the $1.3 spending bill approved by the Senate because it did not fully fund his proposed border wall.

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President Donald Trump said Friday he’s considering vetoing the major spending bill approved by the Senate, since it does not fully fund his proposed border wall. Trump had asked for about $25 billion for the wall but the bill contains about $1.6 billion for border security. He also decried the bill’s lack of a fix for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA.

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The disposition firms of Gordon Brothers, Great American Group, Hilco Merchant Resources and Tiger Capital Group announced that the going-out-of-business sales for all 735 Toys ‘R’ Us and Babies ‘R’ Us stores will start Friday. Stores will close once inventory, fixtures and equipment are sold. Inventory exceeds $2 billion in retail value, according to the release. Toys ‘R’ Us announced last week that it would be shutting all of its stores after filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in September 2017. The SPDR S&P Retail ETF is up 5.2% for the past year while the S&P 500 index is up 12.7% for the period.

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Mizuho analyst Thomas McCrohan raised his price target on Square Inc. shares to $61 from $50 on Friday, based on his upbeat assessment of Square’s ability to grow payment volumes and generate better margins than peers. “The successful addition of new ancillary products with much higher margins than traditional payment processing informs our view that Square’s margins will be on pace to exceed traditional scale players in merchant acquiring,” McCrohan wrote. He points to the company’s coffee-rewards program that gives Square Cash Card users $1 off coffee purchases as an example of a program that could “create habits” and get more people, particularly millennials, to use Square’s consumer-facing product. Separately, an analyst at Craig Hallum Capital Group downgraded Square shares to sell, according to FactSet. They’re down 2.5% in premarket trading but up 232% over the past 12 months, while the S&P 500 is up 13%.

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From:: Stock Market News

Market timer Tom McClellan, publisher of the McClellan Market Report, said he will change back to short-term bullish on the stock market for the first time in nearly four weeks, has he sees a “panicked and oversold condition worthy of a very temporary bounce.” S&P 500 futures rose 0.3% early Friday, after being down as much as 0.7% earlier. He had changed to short-term bearish from bullish on Feb. 28, and then to neutral on March 20. McClellan will maintain his long-term bearish stance, which he’s had since Feb. 28. Among the technical signals McClellan mentioned for his oversold view are a “rainbow convergence” of four indicators which usually leads to pause, a high reading in the volume-weighted breadth measure the Arms Index and the wide spread between the spot VIX index and VIX futures. “Given this oversold condition, and all of the worries that traders are experiencing, I figure we can get an oversold bottom opportunity on Friday, and a bounce back upward as cooler heads prevail,” McClellan wrote in a note to clients. The S&P 500 tumbled 2.5% on Thursday, and has lost 3.8% since Feb. 27.

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