Dick's Sporting Goods (DKS) plunged Tuesday after announcing it will to stop selling firearms at 125 stores and missing same-store sales estimates.The sports equipment retailer also guided low on profit for current fiscal year after Foot Locker (FL) reported a blowout Q4 earlier this month. Read More...

Analysts are still trying to figure out what Nvidia Corporation’s $6.9 billion acquisition of Mellanox Technologies Ltd. could mean for the long term, as the two companies’ businesses overlap very little. Nvidia is famous for its state-of-the-art graphics oriented chips.Over the years, it has seen an upsurge of its usage and relevance across new workloads, especially in data center markets including applications in high-performance computing and artificial intelligence. Mellanox, on the other hand, specializes in networking chip and card making and has very little to do with actual computing.

Top U.S. buyers of Venezuelan crude oil are in a fix as they now have to return millions of barrels of crude oil due to sanctions on the South American nation, implemented on Jan 28 this year on its state-run energy firm PDVSA. According to a Reuters report, PDVSA’s U.S. refining subsidiary Citgo Petroleum Corp and Valero Energy (VLO) want to return 2 million barrels of crude oil loaded before the sanctions.Both of these were rejected by the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control, which oversees sanctions. Chevron, the second-largest U.S. oil firm in terms of market value, further attempted to take the oil shipments in lieu of loans and dividends stemming from joint ventures with PDVSA.

Last Friday, tech giant Microsoft entered federal court in San Jose, California to sue a unit of Taiwanese contract manufacturer Foxconn over unpaid royalties on the consumer devices it makes for others. Microsoft has a patent license with Foxconn that demands the latter make payments for smartphones, tablets and other devices, as well as to provide an annual audit to Microsoft.Taiwan's Foxconn on Tuesday responded to Microsoft’s patent infringement lawsuit by saying that as a contract manufacturer, it has never needed to pay any royalties to the software giant. Following this suit, it now seems that Foxconn needs to own up to its defaults and pay back the outstanding royalties to Microsoft.

Stitch Fix soared in after-hours trading Monday, on strong fiscal second quarter performance. The online subscription fashion & styling service company reported earnings of 12 cents per share for the quarter, surpassing Wall Street estimates of 5 cents a share. The company's quarterly revenue came in at $370 million, beating Street expectation of $365 million.Stitch Fix founder and CEO Katrina Lake emphasized that the firm delivered growth of over +20% for the six consecutive quarters since the company went public. The number of active clients of Stitch Fix grew +18% year-over-year to 2.96 million, edging past estimates of 2.95 million. Looking ahead, Stitch Fix expects its third-quarter revenue to range between $388 million and $398 million, higher than the $384 million forecast by Refinitiv.

The Boeing 737 MAX, the type of plane involved in a deadly crash in Ethiopia over the weekend, is still airworthy, the Federal Aviation Administration said Monday, giving a vote of confidence to the type of jet that has been involved in two deadly crashes since October. Read More...

The recovery, however, was not seen strong enough to alter the course of a U.S. economy that was losing momentum in early 2019. January’s increase in retail sales recouped only a fraction of December’s plunge, leaving expectations for a slowdown in consumer spending in the first quarter intact. Retail sales rose 0.2% as increased purchases of building materials and more discretionary spending offset the biggest decline in motor vehicle sales in five years.Data for December was revised to show sales dropping 1.6% instead of decreasing 1.2% as previously reported.

The White House said on Monday it was "absurd" to suggest that President Donald Trump was an unreliable negotiator as China reportedly balks at a summit with President Xi Jinping over concerns Trump would walk away from a trade deal. Read more...

The catastrophic slump of Singapore’s much-vaunted water and power company, Hyflux Ltd., has stunned 34,000 retail investors who were lured by the promise of a 6 percent annual return forever from a company that seemed to have a gold seal of government approval. Read More...

Hospital groups are objecting strongly to billions of dollars in proposed Medicare and Medicaid payment cuts in President Donald Trump's budget. Two major hospital trade groups did not mince words in blog posts Monday by their leaders. Chip Kahn, president of the Federation of American Hospitals, is calling proposed Medicare cuts "arbitrary and blunt," adding, "the impact on care for seniors would be devastating." American Hospital Association President Rick Pollack says the budget raises "serious concerns about how hospitals and health systems can ensure they serve as the safety net" for patients. The budget includes a range of hospital cuts over 10 years, including reduced reimbursements for uncompensated care and lower rates for outpatient departments.

In an ever-changing retail landscape, home improvement giant Lowe’s Companies (LOW) managed to deliver impressive Q4 result that saw its sales grow to $15.6 billion, a 1% y-o-y increase, and adjusted earnings per share (EPS) rising to $0.80, an 8.1% y-o-y increase.However, this is not a definitive success as the company still has to figure out how to stay relevant in the changing demand landscape. CEO Marvin Ellison has identified three key areas that must be improved for an overall success: taking care of the Pros, taking care of the digital sales, and finally taking care of delivery. In the retail industry, Pro customers are defined as those in the construction trades or the maintenance, repair, and operations industry.

According to the Wall Street Journal, personal care and household products company Helen of Troy Ltd is looking to exit the mass-market beauty segment amidst the company’s overall shift towards more niche personal care brands and products. The beauty business segment that makes Revlon hair dryers and Pert shampoo is likely to sell this beauty segment at an estimated $300 million.The proceeds will go towards housewares and health businesses. Being the smallest business segment, HELE has been struggling as its sales from this division came at $356 million, down 18% from the $435 million it made in 2015. Majority of the market shares has been taken away from the company by speciality beauty stores like Sephora and Mac that also sell their products in drug stores and discount retailers. In the fiscal 2018, half the company’s revenue was made by its health-and-home unit, which features PUR water filters and Vicks humidifiers.

airlines attempted Monday to assure nervous customers that the Boeing 737 MAX jets they fly are safe, a day after one of the new jets operated by Ethiopian Airlines crashed outside of Addis Ababa and killed all 157 people on board.READ MORE...

Helen of Troy Limited is reportedly considering a sale of its beauty segment. According to the Wall Street Journal, the company wants to focus more on its health and household products, and is therefore looking to divest its beauty division.The sale of the segment, which supplies Revlon hair dryers and Beadhead TIGI shampoos among other products, is estimated to fetch $300 million in proceeds (according to the Journal, citing sources familiar with the matter). While health and housewares made up more than half of Helen’s revenue as of 2018, its beauty unit is quite small in comparison.

Sometimes too powerful. Last year, a spate of lynchings triggered by viral hoax messages on its service put the company at the center of a debate about misinformation in the country, where it has more than 200 million users.READ MORE...

Google is rolling out another app just for India, this time to help children learn to read. Bolo, an online reading tutor, was made available to Indian users of Google's Android operating system this week after months of testing, the company said.READ MORE...

The longest bull market in American history was dealt a scary brush with death late last year.But it survived, narrowly, and it's now been alive for a decade. The market upswing, born out of the ashes of the Great Recession, turned 10 years old on Saturday. READ MORE...

The analysts set a $20 price target on the cyber-security company’s shares. Analyst Sterling Auty cited FireEye’s “market leading incident response service with an expanding product portfolio" as factors behind the rating upgrade.Additionally, Auty emphasized that FireEye’s strong expense control as a contributor to operating leverage should be a tailwind for the company whose stock  is currently trading under 4x EV/Sales. FireEye shares climbed +3.4% in pre-market trading Monday.

On Monday, U.S. semiconductor giant Nvidia said that it will buy Israeli multinational company Mellanox Technologies for $6.8 billion in cash. Mellanox is a supplier of networking products for computer servers, and is a cloud-computing chip specialist whose market capitalization stood at $5.9 billion as of Friday’s close.The deal would be Nvidia’s biggest-ever acquisition. 

The analyst set a new price target of  $45 a share – around +52% higher compared to the consumer directed benefits/tax benefits-management firm’s current stock price. Wells Fargo’s upgrade on WageWorks comes a month after Zacks Investment Research upped its rating on the stock to "hold".Although SunTrust Banks analyst Tobey Sommer cut his target price to $50 a share for WageWorks in February, he maintained his "buy" rating on the stock.