At one point in the day, the rupee crossed  74 against the US dollar (for the first time ever), following the Indian central bank's stance to hold off  an interest rate hike  – a decision that went against the general expectation. So far, the Indian rupee has plunged around -15% against the dollar this year.This happened even as the Indian government made efforts to ease foreign purchase of rupee bonds and also increased tariffs on imported goods.

Sears Holdings announced that it will close six more Sears stores alongwith  five Kmart stores, mostly in November and December. In late August, it said that it will shutter more than 13 Kmart stores, following 2017’s closing down of 45.  This is happening as the company faces challenges with its debt repayment schedules.Sears Holdings CEO Eddie Lampert is trying to get creditors to allow a restructuring of roughly $1.1 billion of the company's debt coming due in the next two years.

Elon Musk might have stirred a controversy again, by yet another tweet – this time calling the SEC the  “Shortseller Enrichment Commission”. Per last weekend’s settlement, Tesla agreed to pay $20 million in fine to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) while Musk would step down as chairman but continue as the company’s CEO.Apparently, there were some claims/allegations at the time that short-sellers - who try to profit by borrowing shares and selling them to buy them back at expected lower prices - lost millions due to Musk's August 7 tweet. On Thursday, District Judge Alison Nathan in Manhattan asked Elon Musk and the SEC to justify that the settlement deal they had made was fair and would not hurt the public interest.

Snap Inc. shares increased +3.2% in pre-market trading , following reports of CEO Evan Spiegel’s profitability projection for 2019 along with his plans to avoid past mistakes for the company. In a leaked 15-page memo, reported by online news service Cheddar, Spiegel indicated to employees that Snapchat  is on track to achieve targets at a “sustainable pace “ and would avoid overly aggressive strategies of the past.The company will now take “time to rest and reassess.” He also said, “We improved goal-setting across our teams with OKR processes that provide share visibility into the progress we are making against our priorities.

Had Unilever gone ahead with the plan, it would have been designated as a Dutch company and therefore could potentially have gotten removed from London's FTSE 100 index.  However, Unilever announced the abandonment of that plan on Friday, since major shareholders did not give the go-ahead on moving headquarters out of the U.K.  

Investors are fleeing a major U.S. real-estate fund, as recent interest rate increases are apparently being viewed as potential headwinds for housing demand/real estate business. The $3.8 billion iShares U.S. Real Estate ETF experienced $530 million outflows between Monday and Wednesday.The U.S. 10-year Treasury yields climbed to around 3.2% on Wednesday (its highest level since 2011), and 30-year bonds and 2-year notes posted record high yields as well.

American Express Co. is increasing reward points for its premium credit card customers. AmEx Gold Card holders will now earn 4 points per dollar spent at U.S. restaurants and supermarkets, up from 2 points previously.Additionally, they get a yearly $120 credit by using their cards to make payments to the Cheesecake Factory, Ruth’s Chris Steak House, certain Shake Shack locations, GrubHub and Seamless.

With the U.S.-China trade war flaring up, some strategists at JPMorgan have lowering their recommendation on Chinese stocks to neutral from overweight. With the two nations slapping tariffs on  goods imported from each other, Chinese manufacturers’ profit margins might be getting hurt – something that's a potential headwind for the nation’s investment and growth.In the latest round of the tariff battle, U.S. President Donald Trump imposed a 10 percent tariff on an additional $200 billion of Chinese goods, to which the Chinese government responded with levies on $60 billion of U.S. products. JPMorgan reduced its target and earnings estimates for the MSCI China Index, but the strategists still expect the index to rebound to 85 points by the end of the year.

Credit-rating agency Moody's upgraded semiconductor company Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) on Wednesday. Recently, AMD’s stock price plunged following Tuesday’s reports that rival Intel Corp. might be able to solve problems in its 10-nanometer chip production sooner than expected.Nevertheless, Moody’s upgraded AMD's ‘creditworthiness’, citing several factors related to market potential of the latter's products. According to Moody’s, AMD is currently sampling a 7nm datacenter GPU  and 7 nanometer server processors, expected to be launched in 2018 and 2019 respectively.

Softbank and Toyota are joining hands for developing driverless technology-based transportation businesses. In a joint venture called Monet, the two Japanese companies will offer services including mobile convenience stores, delivery vehicles, transportation for the elderly, hospital shuttles and mobile offices – all via autonomous vehicles.For instance, by the second half of the 2020s, the venture will start an on-demand mobility service using Toyota's self-driving electric vehicle called e-Palette for meal deliveries and hospital shuttles. The companies said that the joint venture will start at 2 billion yen ($17.49 million), and will be raised to 10 billion yen in future.

The defense giant has just been awarded a $26.7 MM contract to provide maintenance and technical support for the Trident II D5 missile over the next two years at its facilities in Huntington Beach, CA and Heath, OH. The Trident II (D5) is a long range missile equipped on submarines since the early 1990s.Its guidance and delivery systems are constantly upgraded as technology evolves, and the missiles are intended to remain in service for at least another decade. The United States defense budget has been approved for an increase of 5% in 2019, totaling $717 billion, which could contribute to strong years for Beoing (BA), Lockheed Martin (LMT), Huntington Ingalls Industries (HII) and other defense contractors.

Xilinx Inc. launched Alveo, a portfolio of  accelerator cards expected to increase productivity of industry-standard servers across cloud and on-premise data centers. Alveo U200 and Alveo U250 will help customers optimize their productivity according to changing workloads and algorithms, without additional replacement costs. Xilinx has also unveiled Versal, the industry's first adaptive compute acceleration platform.This will cater to AI inference capabilities for various industries, and will be available next year.   The company already enjoys a 58% market share in the field-programmable gate array (FPGA ) market, while competitor Intel holds 42% as of April 2018.

Honda is investing $2 billion over 12 years in General Motors's self-driving cars.  Honda and GM's autonomous vehicle subsidiary Cruise have been collaborating in the development of self-driving versions of GM's Chevrolet Bolt EV electric car, which are expected to be available for public use next year.But what could potentially put the two companies in the fast lane is their latest partnership where they plan to build an apparently one-of-a-kind vehicle that might not require human controls at all.  Additionally, Honda has bought a $750 million equity stake in Cruise, which also received $2.25 billion funding from Japanese investment bank Softbank. Earlier there were rumors of Honda in talks with Waymo, the self-driving unit of Google parent company Alphabet, to build a self-driving delivery car.

Microsoft unveiled its lineup of new devices including a desktop computer, its first pair of smart headphones and new laptop models. The Surface Studio 2 PC will offer faster performance and improved graphics compared to the first Surface version.Starting at $899, it will come in black and platinum.  Microsoft also announced its Windows 10 October 2018 Update, which aims to enhance productivity, such as allowing the Your Phone App to pull up texts and photos from your Android phone onto your PC.

Facebook announced that it has not found any evidence (as yet) of its cyber attackers accessing third party sites via Facebook Login. This follow’s Friday’s revelations by the company that hackers exploited a loophole in the “View As” feature on the social networking platform and as a result got access to information of over 50 million of users.Many apps including Tinder, Spotify and Airbnb let people access their services through Facebook Login credentials. Hackers might not have misused other apps while infiltrating Facebook data, but the attack potentially puts the users of the third-party apps at risk.

  President Trump imposed an October 1 deadline which precipitated the lengthy meeting, and made repeated public statements that the United States would be willing to leave Canada out of the deal if they weren’t willing to negotiate the terms of the agreement in a timely manner.Such an eventuality would have left Canada without the protections of a then-defunct NAFTA, although the legality of such a move was seen as highly questionable by some. The resulting agreement preserves the panel review system as in Chapter 19 of NAFTA, despite threats by Trump to scrap it, wherein each member is given a venue through which to challenge the trade policies of other members.

This comes after U.S. District Judge Paul Oetken said the investors could sue the company as a group. In their lawsuit, shareholders accused the hedge fund/asset management firm of misleading investors by concealing the Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) probes into the company’s potential violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.The lawsuit, filed in 2014, covers investors who owned Och-Ziff shares from February 2012 to April 2014.  Och-Ziff ‘s settlement against its shareholders’ lawsuit  follows the company’s $412 million settlement in Sept. 2016 for the U.S. Department of Justice criminal probe.    

Ford Motor Co.'s U.S. sales chief Mark LaNeve is not nervous about competition with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV." LaNeve seemed to attribute the recent decline in Ford vehicle sales mostly to the -11% drop in sales to rental car agencies. But he is looking forward to revamped models of its SUVs, the Escape and Explorer, to be launched in the middle of 2019 and hopes these to boost sales.

Tesla had record car sales, even as U.S.-China trade war apparently looms large over the carmaker’s China market. The company confirmed numbers leaked to an industry news site on Monday that it produced around 80,000 cars in Q3.What's more, beating Wall Street expectations of 80,000, deliveries peaked at 83,500 - including almost 56,000 of the Model 3 sedan whose market is seen as critical to the company’ profit potential. However, Tesla admitted that it had missed its weekly Model 3 production target. Tesla is also apparently concerned about the 40% tariff China has slapped on imports of its cars - something that could potentially thwart the firm's sales and/or income from  the world' s biggest consumer of electric vehicles.

PepsiCo, Inc. reported earnings higher than expected, as new strategies for the North American market paid off, along with growing sales in emerging markets. Excluding one-time items, the company raked in $1.59 per share earnings, beating analysts' estimates of $1.57 for the third quarter ending September 8.Total net income of $2.49 billion (or $1.75 per share) was up a whopping 16% from $2.14 billion (or $1.48 per share) a year earlier. Net revenue increased 1.5 percent to $16.49 billion, which is higher than analysts' average projection of $16.36 billion. By shifting its beverage portfolio more towards healthier options such as non-carbonated drinks and sparkling water (including its launch of brands Bubly and Lifewtr), Pepsi managed to revive sales in an increasingly health-conscious consumer segment of  North America.