As It Turns Out, A Lot Of People Watched Two Shitty Teams Play An NFL Game On Yahoo

“He wanted people to run. He intentionally designed the report to frighten our shareholders to drive down the price of the stock so he could make money.” — Valeant Pharmaceuticals CEO Michael Pearson. What’s Pearson all hot and bothered about? Read on for all the details.

MARKET SNAPSHOT 

Housing Data Hits Hard

  • U.S. stocks closed mixed, dragged down by Apple and negative housing data, but lifted by gains in tech stocks not named Apple. Apple’s drop was attributed to one of its suppliers, Dialog Semiconductor, posting earnings that missed expectations, sufficiently spooking investors that Apple’s fourth-quarter sales may not be as strong as anticipated. We’ll find out soon either way—Apple reports its own earnings today.
  • Coming off two straight weeks of losses, oil continued the trend Monday, falling to a two-month low over continued fears of oversupply thanks to unseasonably warm weather and a pessimistic Goldman Sachs report.
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U.S. MACRO 

Dissecting New Home Sales

After two months of strong numbers, new home sales in the U.S. dropped to their lowest levels since November 2014. It may look like that the housing market is slowing down, but experts remain optimistic. Many attribute the disappointing figure to a shortage of labor and the large amount of time it takes to build a new house—in other words, supply just isn’t keeping up with demand. Other real estate data points, such as existing home sales (which makes up a much larger portion of the housing market), remain strong and steady, showing that this segment might be a tiny blemish on an otherwise healthy market.

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CORPORATE PRIMER

The Investor that Cried Wolf

Know the name: Andrew Left of Citron Research. He has caused quite the fiasco after publishing a report last week accusing drugmaker Valeant Pharmaceuticals of Enron-like fraud—essentially operating a web of fake pharmacies that were recording revenues of drugs that were never actually sold. The report spooked Valeant’s investors, causing shares to plummet 25 percent, not to mention generating boatloads of cash for Citron, which of course was already short the stock. For its part, Valeant went on the offensive yesterday, vehemently denying the allegations and asking the SEC to investigate Left and Citron. Get your popcorn ready: the battle of Citron vs. Valeant is just getting started.
Iconic Auto Repair Companies Merge
Following pressure from activist investor Mario Gabelli, Pep Boys has agreed to be bought by Bridgestone in an $835 million all-cash deal—a 23 percent premium to Pep Boy’s Friday share price. It looks like a sweet deal all-around, as Bridgestone will look to leverage the strong Pep Boys brand name, while Pep Boys will join the largest automotive network in the world.

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TODAY IN TECH

JP Morgan Stands Up to Apple

Yesterday, JP Morgan Chase unveiled a new product that will allow customers to pay retailers using their smartphones. Sound familiar? Yes, it’s a direct competitor to Apple Pay, and if you’re going to take on Apple, you’ll need a lot of firepower. Good thing that JP Morgan has already convinced Wal-Mart and Best Buy to sign on, and has agreed to a deal with the Merchant Customer Exchange (which has retail sales of over $1 trillion). JP Morgan’s goal: hope to gain market share by undercutting prices, stealing volume and tapping into the rapidly-expanding smartphone payment space. Let the games begin.

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OTHER STORIES
  • Dell-EMC: the canary in the coal mine for enterprise M&A
  • Drones getting badly needed air traffic control
  • Deutsche Bank reviews future of Italian business
  • Over 260 dead as earthquake strikes Afghanistan, Pakistan
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ECONOMIC CALENDAR
  • Monday: Broadcom, MGM Resorts, Xerox Earnings; New Home Sales
  • Tuesday: Aflac, Alibaba, Apple, BP, Coach, Comcast, Ford, Gilead, JetBlue, Panera, Pfizer, T-Mobile, Twitter, UPS Earnings; Durable Goods Orders
  • Wednesday: GoPro, Volkswagen, Yelp Earnings; Fed FOMC Meeting Announcement
  • Thursday: Baidu, Deckers, Deutsche Bank, LinkedIn, MasterCard, Samsung, Starbucks, Time Warner Cable Earnings; U.S. Q3 GDPs
  • Friday: Chevron, CVS, Exxon Mobil, Phillips 66 Earnings; Personal Income/Spending

NFL HITS THE WEB

Picture a classic all-American, Sunday football game. Where are you watching it? Around a big flatscreen, right? Well, it looks like things might be changing—the NFL just successfully completed its first live web stream of an NFL game on Yahoo. So how’d it go? The Brew has more:

  • The early Sunday game, a special London contest between the Buffalo Bills and Jacksonville Jaguars, drew 15.2 million viewers, a fairly strong number.
  • Viewers had mixed reviews of the quality of the stream, though Yahoo said the rebuffering ratio was only 1 percent—meaning those who complained may have just been a very vocal minority.
  • This deal didn’t come free: Yahoo paid the NFL a hefty $20 million for the rights, while 30 brands advertised during the game, at a rate of $100,000 per ad.
  • The question remains: now that football is growing its global presence, will the rest of the world start holding Super Bowl Sunday? And will they be gathering around a TV…or a computer?

INTERVIEW QUESTION OF THE DAY

What is the smallest integer such that if you rotate the number to the left, you get a number that is exactly one and a half times the original number? (To rotate the number left, take the first digit off the front and append it to the end of the number. 2591 rotated to the left is 5912.) (Answer)

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BUSINESS TERM OF THE DAY

Pareto Analysis — A technique used for decision making based on the Pareto Principle, known as the 80/20 rule. It is a decision-making technique that statistically separates a limited number of input factors as having the greatest impact on an outcome, either desirable or undesirable. Pareto analysis is based on the idea that 80 percent of a project’s benefit can be achieved by doing 20 percent of the work, or conversely, 80 percent of problems are traced to 20 percent of the causes.

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FOOD FOR THOUGHT
165 mph: the estimated wind speeds of Hurricane Patricia when it slammed into Mexico on Friday. It’s only the eighth recorded hurricane to reach category 5 on U.S. soil.

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