Puma, the third largest athletic shoe company in the world, is set to take on arch rival Nike and launch its auto-lacing smart shoe called the Fit Intelligence (Fi) in Spring 2020.Priced at a competitive $330, Fi is cheaper than Nike’s Adapt BB—a comparable self-lacing smart basketball shoe--by nearly $20. This new variety of sports shoes can be connected to an app, from which the laces can be adjusted with a swipe of a finger.

GE's power business has been struggling for some time now with stock declining on earnings in the past 11 out of 13 quarters. GE’s CEO Larry Culp is positive that the company will make substantial progress in the coming months, but for now there will be some residual effects from non-operational headwinds related to legal settlements and legacy project erosion.Further, GE’s cash flow may also be affected by restructuring and investments in health-care, but Culp assured shareholders that these are just one-time items, which in the long run will cool off. To buttress Culp’s optimism, analysts claim that whatever challenges the power business is facing today, GE is making a realistic assessment and tailoring a solution.

As the FOMC were in the process of reversing multiple years of near zero interest rates, the path back to rate ‘normalization’ was communicated relatively clearly to the public.So throughout the last few years, the number and timing of Fed Funds rate hikes was never a surprise. READ MORE...

ON Semiconductor Corp. (ON - Free Report) came out with quarterly earnings of $0.53 per share, beating the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $0.48 per share.These figures are adjusted for non-recurring items. READ MORE...

Harley-Davidson shares tanked by more than 9 percent Tuesday after the company reported fourth quarter earnings that missed analysts’ expectations. The motorcycle maker is battling declining sales as its core riders age, particularly in the United States, its largest market.READ MORE...

Symantec Corp. reported adjusted earnings of 44 cents a share in the third quarter, beating analysts' expectation of 39 cents a share.At $1.21 billion, revenues too outpaced Wall Street estimates of $1.18 billion. For the current quarter ending in March, the cybersecurity software company projects earnings to be in the range of 37 cents to 41 cents a share.

January’s super strong jobs report and a solid manufacturing survey on Friday showed that recession worries may be overblown and slowdown fears are not impacting corporate hiring or dampening manufacturers’ sentiment.READ MORE...

On Thursday, the fintech company, which provides payment and invoice services, reported solid fiscal second-quarter earnings, but apparently fell shy of being remarkable. Adjusted earnings of 35 cents per share matched Zacks Investment Research estimate.It was higher compared to the year-ago period’s 31 cents a share. With a 10% year-over-year increase in the quarter ended Dec. 31, Bottomline’s revenue touched $104.8 million.

Cypress Semiconductor Corp. shares jumped +8% on Friday, following the company’s earnings report release post-market close on Thursday. The semiconductor company reported adjusted earnings of 35 cents a share for the fourth quarter, beating Zacks Consensus Estimate by 2 cents.The company’s revenue for the full year climbed +7% from the previous year, to touch $2.5 billion.  The company’s projections for 2019 include first-quarter revenue in the range of $520 million and $550 million, and adjusted earnings of 22 cents per share for the period. Cypress' CEO Hassane El-Khoury indicated that the company would continue to focus on the following markets: Internet of Things (Internet-connected devices), automotive and industrial.

China's beaten down stock market could be headed for a rebound. The benchmark Shanghai Composite was the world's worst performing major stock market last year, tumbling more than 25%.It was weighed down by fears about China's slowing economy and the trade war with the United States.

The average net addition to workforce for the last three months is now 241,000 jobs — which is an acceleration in job growth. The leisure and hospitality sector, which hired 74,000 employees, led the job gains for the month.Construction and health care added 52,000 and 42,000 jobs respectively. In January, average hourly earnings for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls increased by 3 cents to $27.56, following a 10-cent gain in December.

A private survey on China's manufacturing sector showed on Friday that factory activity contracted more-than-expected in January — confirming views that the world's second-largest economy started the new year on soft footing. Read More...

Stocks rose to close out their best January in three decades as strong earnings and a Federal Reserve indicating it will pause rate hikes caused investors to rush back into the market following a vicious December sell-off. Read More...

Facebook’s latest Q4 report reveals forecast-beating top and bottom-line growth, resulting into the shares of the company rising by 7.1% after hours. Revenues rose 30% to $16.9 billion.Monthly active users were also up 9%, to 2.32 billion. But perhaps the most compelling figure showed that the company's effective tax rate dropped to 14% from 43% the year prior. The company also estimates a whopping 2.7 billion users each month accessing the various platforms (Instagram, Facebook, Whatsapp or Messenger). Capex for the quarter stood at $4.37 billion, while liquidity was $41.11 billion at quarter's end.

E-commerce giant -- and the second most valuable public company in Asia after Tencent -- Alibaba Group’s quarterly report confirmed record slow growth.Third-quarter revenue notched 117.28 billion yuan ($17.47 billion), compared with 83 billion yuan a year earlier — owing to the weakening impact of Chinese economy and a damaging Sino-U.S trade war.  Alibaba’s sales are often considered a benchmark to evaluate consumer spending across the world, and diminishing sales are concerning for  investors, as they are proof of the pressures the company is facing. However, net income rose 33% to 30.96 billion yuan, beating forecasts and sending Alibaba's stock up by about 1.6% in pre-market trade. Typically, Alibaba’s highest sales come from its biggest online sales event, "Singles' Day," that even surpasses the combined sales figure of U.S.’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales.

With global paying customers increasing by 26% y-o-y to more than 139 million -- coupled with a forecast-beating addition of 8.84 million subscribers during the quarter -- there is little room for doubt that the streaming giant is an ongoing success. Reasons for this booming number of subscribers? Netflix is known for the abundance and quality of content, and since its inception, the company has worked hard to analyze and interpret viewers’ demand patterns.To reach this spot, the company used data from review aggregation sites like the Rotten Tomatoes to understand people’s choices, and now Netflix boasts of 596 ‘certified fresh’ movies that give its content a richness unmatched by other streaming sites.  

It’s been nearly a century since any automaker was in a more enviable position than Tesla. Despite relatively disappointing fourth-quarter earnings that missed analysts’ estimates, Tesla finished 2018 with an astounding 83 percent share of the U.S. battery-electric vehicle market, CEO Elon Musk boasted on Wednesday.That hasn’t happened since the years following the start-up of Ford’s first moving assembly line. READ MORE...

Avon Products said that it plans to reduce its global workforce by 10% this year. The cosmetics and personal care company expects the employee retrenchment to save about $97 million (before taxes) by the end of this year."Decisions like these are always difficult, however, we must take the actions necessary to improve our operations and strengthen our ability to continue investing in our transformation initiatives and fuel our future growth”, said Jan Zijderveld, CEO of Avon. Avon is also cutting back on its Stock Keeping Units (or SKU codes) by a quarter to save on long-term costs. 

An official survey that has been withheld by the government shows India’s unemployment rate rose to its highest level in at least 45 years in 2017/18, the Business Standard newspaper reported on Thursday, delivering a blow to Prime Minister Narendra Modi months before a general election.READ MORE...

A large part of the sales growth can be attributed to the tech giant’s cloud computing business which grew +48% year-over-year to touch $9 billion in the quarter. Microsoft has been increasingly steering focus towards its commercial cloud segment Azure, which is apparently a strong competitor to Amazon Web Services.Microsoft recently announced a deal to become pharmacy retail company Walgreens' cloud provider, wherein it intends to improve data processing on customers' health conditions and therefore potentially enable pharmacists to offer better pharmacy/wellness solutions.