Feb. 10 at 3:20 p.m.
Filed under:
Investing,
Retail,
Venture capital
By Reuters
Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)
Chicago-based daily deal site Groupon said on Thursday Starbucks Corp Chief Executive Howard Schultz has joined its board of directors and that his venture capital firm has taken a stake in the daily deals website.
Schultz’ firm, Maveron, previously invested in retailers such as zulily, which offers daily deals on clothing geared to mothers and their children, and the lucy activewear chain, which was sold to VF Corp in 2007.
Groupon reportedly got a $6 billion takeover bid from Google in November, which it turned down. Two-year-old Groupon recently completed a $950 million round of financing. Get the full story »
Feb. 10 at 2:06 p.m.
Filed under:
IPOs,
Internet,
Investing
By Reuters
Facebook is considering letting its employees sell up to $1 billion of their shares to institutional investors, at a price valuing the company at about $60 billion, an influential industry blog reported. Get the full story »
Feb. 10 at 10:16 a.m.
Filed under:
Investing
By Becky Yerak
A venture-capital investor in Chicago-based Groupon is placing a bet on another local company.
Chicago-based Abe’s Market , an online marketplace for a wide range of natural products, has closed a $3.4 million round of financing led by Accel Partners, which in late 2009 invested in Groupon. Accel, which has more than $6 billion under management, is joined by existing investor Index Ventures as well as other angel investors.
Abe’s Market works with almost 300 vendors and said it has seen its orders grow by 900 percent over the past six months. Get the full story »
Feb. 10 at 9:23 a.m.
Filed under:
Investing
From Bloomberg News | Chicago-based Mesirow Financial Inc. said Thursday it will start an investment management joint venture with Mubadala Development Co., an investment arm of the Abu Dhabi government.
Feb. 10 at 8:46 a.m.
Filed under:
Insurance,
Investing
By Dow Jones Newswires
Insurer Allstate Corp. plans to reduce the size of a hedging program designed to protect its $100 billion investment portfolio from steep declines.
The insurer spent “over several hundred million dollars” on the hedges in 2010 to shield the portfolio from sharp interest rate increases or a substantial drop in equities, Chief Executive Tom Wilson said on a conference call with analysts and investors Thursday. Get the full story »
By Associated Press
Archer Daniels Midland Co. on Wednesday announced a 5-year plan to invest in nearly 30,000 acres of palm trees in Brazil and build a new processing plant as part of a program to use palm in its biodiesel production.
The plant and palm acres are located in the northern Brazilian state of Para. Construction on the plant near Sao Domingos do Capim is anticipated to begin in 2013. It is expected to be operational in 2016. Get the full story »
Feb. 7 at 5:39 p.m.
Filed under:
Hotels,
Investing
By Dow Jones Newswires
One of America’s wealthiest clans, the Pritzker family, is continuing to shed assets with the expected sale of Triton Container International Ltd. to private equity firms Warburg Pincus and Vestar Capital, people familiar with the matter said.
The buyout shops are close to a deal to acquire the shipping-container leasing company owned by Chicago’s Pritzker family for about $1 billion, these people said.
The Pritzkers, which took the Hyatt Hotels Corp. hotel chain public in 2009, are among the wealthiest U.S. families, controlling a business empire founded by Nicholas J. Pritzker more than a century ago. Get the full story »
Feb. 4 at 12:05 p.m.
Filed under:
Investing,
Sports
By Reuters
Forget the oddsmakers. What does the smart money on Wall Street say about the Super Bowl this Sunday? Green Bay over Pittsburgh.
Using a model that assigns teams in the National Football League a value for outperforming market expectations — what investors call alpha — the Packers will beat the Steelers because the Packers’ alpha is lower. That is, they exceeded expectations less frequently than the Steelers during the season. Get the full story »
Feb. 3 at 2:23 p.m.
Filed under:
Banking,
Investing,
Litigation
By Reuters
Top executives at JPMorgan Chase & Co. got blunt warnings about speculation that Bernard Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme but appear to have been concerned only with protecting the bank’s investments, the trustee seeking to recoup $6.4 billion for Madoff investors said. Get the full story »
Feb. 3 at 1:22 p.m.
Filed under:
Exchanges,
Investing
By Dow Jones Newswires
CME Group Inc. said Thursday that it would launch federal-funds futures contracts extending three years in a move expanding investor options for assessing longer-term Federal Reserve interest rate policy.
The world’s largest futures exchange by trading volume said it would add the third-year contracts to its existing slate, with a planned Feb. 27 launch of monthly fed-funds futures for February 2013 through January 2014. Get the full story »
Feb. 3 at 12:31 p.m.
Filed under:
Government,
Investing,
Litigation
By Reuters
TD Ameritrade Holding Corp. will reimburse about $10 million to customers to settle Securities and Exchange Commission charges that it misled them about the safety of a money market mutual fund.
The SEC announced the settlement Thursday after accusing TD Ameritrade of failing to reasonably supervise sales representatives who mischaracterized the Reserve Yield Plus Fund as being as safe as cash or having guaranteed liquidity. Get the full story »
Jan. 31 at 12:34 p.m.
Filed under:
Investing,
Retirement
By Reuters
Affluent women expect to be more active than their male counterparts in retirement, but they are also more worried about outliving their money, according to a Bank of America Merrill Lynch study.
The vast majority of affluent baby boomers believe their retirement will be more active and prosperous than that of their parents, the quarterly survey found. Get the full story »
Jan. 28 at 4:37 p.m.
Filed under:
Investing
By Reuters
Goldman Sachs Group more than tripled Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein’s salary to $2 million for this year, according to a filing made with regulators Friday.
The bank, which has come under fire for its pay practices, also raised the salaries of Chief Financial Officer David Viniar and Chief Operating Officer Gary Cohn to $1.85 million, the filing said. All three executives previously earned a base salary of $600,000, according to filings. Get the full story »
Jan. 28 at 12:50 p.m.
Filed under:
Investing,
Litigation,
Sports
By Associated Press
The New York Mets are exploring a partial sale of the team as they face a lawsuit from a trustee trying to reclaim money for victims of the Bernard Madoff swindle. Get the full story »
Jan. 27 at 3:57 p.m.
Filed under:
Banking,
Investing,
Litigation,
Mortgages
By Reuters
Bank of America Corp.’s Countrywide mortgage unit was hit with at least three new lawsuits accusing it of misleading investors about its finances and lending practices, and may face more by investors who chose not to join a recent class-action settlement.
Wednesday’s lawsuits by the states of Michigan and Oregon and by Fresno County in California were filed five days after Bank of America said it may incur an additional $6.1 billion of writedowns and legal costs tied primarily to Countrywide, which it bought in July 2008. Get the full story »
