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.  

Buckingham analyst Matthew Harrigan cited heated competition in the video streaming space as a crucial factor behind the rating downgrade. Traditional, long-standing media/entertainment giants are looking to expand their digital presence, which could potentially intensify competition to current streaming leader Netflix.  Walt Disney will roll out its streaming platform (called Disney+), while AT&T (via WarnerMedia) is set to launch its own by the second half of the year.Comcast is planning to enter the streaming market in 2020 through NBC Universal. What’s more, Amazon Prime has apparently been upping the ante against rival Netflix.

As Microsoft turns to renewable sources of energy, the company recently announced the signing of a 15-year power purchase agreement for the energy produced by a 74-megawatt solar power facility in North Carolina, called the Wilkinson Solar Energy Center.The company boasts of its commitment to local communities that benefit economically from Microsoft’s energy projects. Tech giants are increasingly turning to renewable energy projects.

The result was nearly 40 canceled flights. The airline recently embarked on an interior remodeling project of its Boeing 737-800 called ‘Project Oasis’ that would add more seats, more power sockets and bigger overhead bins in order to increase revenue for each flight.AAL is also one of the many airlines who had recently adopted this strategy to enhance revenue. The remodeling was done by a third party vendor called Everett, a Washington-based Aviation Technical Services licensed by the Federal Aviation Administration.

In a recent regulatory filing, Tesla disclosed that it has entered into a syndication loan agreement with China Construction Bank, Agricultural Bank of China, Industrial Commercial Bank of China, and Shanghai Pudong Development Bank for loans as much as $520 million to build a Gigafactory factory in Shanghai.  The loan accrues interest at 90% of the one-year rate published by the People's Bank of China for RMB-denominated loans and LIBOR + 1.0% for U.S. dollar-denominated loans. In the same filing, Tesla has also amended its ABL credit pact to upsurge revolving commitments by $500 million to $2.425 billion, sanction up to $200 million in additional commitments, and extend the term of most of the total commitments to 2023. The credit line will be used exclusively to fund development of Tesla’s third gigawatt-scale facility, and it’s first outside the U.S., after the company announced in October that it had secured a 210-acre site in Shanghai for a factory that is intended to pro

Streaming giant Netflix has acquired rights to the 1967 multigenerational masterpiece novel ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ by the Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez.Rodrigo and his brother Gonzalo Garcia Barcha will act as executive producers on the project, which is set to be filmed predominantly in Colombia. A Spanish TV series is not unprecedented in Netflix’s viewership history.

Lockheed Martin, best known for the F-35 fighter, has been awarded a $945.9 million down payment on a $15 billion missile-defense agreement for Saudi -- called the Arabia Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) -- by the Pentagon. This move could potentially alleviate the long standing tensions between Saudi and the Western governments.It is also the first step in a larger deal struck last year between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia that will eventually benefit the Saudi kingdom with 44 THAAD launchers, missiles and affiliated equipment. Tensions between the Saudi and the U.S government had increased over the Saudi-linked killing of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi last October amidst criticism of Saudi’s role in an on-going civil war in Yemen.

Last year, Sony Music Entertainment entered into a $250 million deal with Michael Jackson’s estate for the rights to distribute the musician’s recordings over the course of seven years.For example, in the wake of the documentary series ‘Surviving R. Kelly’, the R&B singer’s songs generated more than 4 million streams in the U.S. accounting for a 116% increase in the rise of streams. But ‘Leaving Neverland’ could have a different impact.

At a time when the Fed is considering freezing rate hikes for the year, market watchers and fund managers think banks could be a great investment option.These include a strong economy and the prospect of higher inflation and a wider rate spread. READ MORE...

Lest we forget, former Starbucks Corporation (SBUX - Free Report)    CEO and now a presidential candidate Howard Schultz had cautioned of this transformation in December 2016.And that prediction, rather unfortunately, has come true for major brick-and-mortar retailers including restaurants. READ MORE...

Shares in mainland China crumbled on Friday after Chinese trade data missed expectations by a wide margin. All major Chinese indexes closed the day deep in negative territory. READ MORE...

An ongoing cryptocurrency bear market is not dampening interest for Fidelity’s new institutional cryptocurrency products. Fidelity Digital Assets, a new company created by the investing giant last year, has quietly rolled out its cryptocurrency custody and trade execution operations. READ MORE...