Tag: Daily Market Brief

Easterbrook, according to a lawsuit, approved a special grant of restricted stock, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, to one of those employees. The company now wants to reclaim hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation paid to Easterbrook on his departure.

The executive orders also include deferrals of payroll tax withholdings for certain workers, deferrals of student loan payments, and action to minimize certain evictions. The president’s actions are likely to have more of a political effect—they should increase the urgency for negotiators to reach a broader fiscal deal—than an economic impact.

Marriott, based in Bethesda, Md., lost 72 cents a share in the quarter, down from earnings of 69 cents a share a year earlier. Revenue totaled nearly $1.5 billion, compared with $5.3 billion in the corresponding quarter last year.

Investors were particularly interested in what CEO Warren Buffett was doing with the company’s large cash balances. With Berkshire shares trading very cheaply relative to book value in May and June, Berkshire bought back a record $5.1 billion of stock in the quarter, up from $1.7 billion in the first quarter and $4.9 billion during all of last year.

The U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, or DFC, tweeted that a loan due to Kodak appears to be on hold for now. Kodak shares were down 29% to $10.52 a share Monday morning in the aftermath of the DFC bombshell.

Nikola shares fell about 10% after the company reported its first quarter as a publicly traded entity on Aug. 4. Part of the disappointment in the aftermath of the report was the lack of any new details about customers for the company’s battery- and fuel-cell-powered heavy-duty trucks. The Republic announcement is the sort of news investors wanted to hear when earnings were released.

Regeneron announced a phase three trial, called REGN-COV2, after positive phase one safety data in July. Now Newman believes initial data from that study could come in late September, ahead of vaccine data.

Many companies, of course, are pursuing a Covid-19 vaccine. But returning the world to normal will take more than an effective vaccine. “REGN-COV2 would provide immediate treatment for active Covid-19, which is critical, since vaccines cannot treat active disease,” wrote Newman in a Monday research report.

The athletic footwear and apparel store said early Monday that it plans to report a second-quarter profit of 38 to 42 cents per share. Analysts had forecast a loss of 46 cents per share, according to FactSet. Adjusting for one-time costs related to recent social unrest and restructuring expenses, it expects a quarterly profit of 66 to 70 cents per share.

Last week, President Donald Trump issued an executive order that demanded that all U.S. companies stop conducting business with the communications platform WeChat and its parent company, Tencent Holdings, within 45 days, citing privacy and security concerns.

For its fiscal third quarter ended June 30, Avaya reported revenue of $721 million, up from $717 million a year ago, and above the company’s guidance range of $674 million to $704 million. Adjusted Ebitda (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) was $187 million, well ahead of guidance at $150 million to $170 million. The company had a profit of 8 cents a share, compared with a loss of $5.70 a share in the quarter a year ago.

Shares were down around 10% in early Wednesday trading. Earnings weren’t what vexed investors. Nikola doesn’t sell trucks yet, and its spending on future capacity is just ramping up. Instead, investors were disappointed that they didn’t hear more about corporate partnerships and new customers.

Wall Street is, essentially, standing pat of the stock. Analysts who liked the stock before earnings still do. Analysts who were more cautious still are.

The company topped consensus estimates for earnings and revenue rose by 64%, according to results it posted on its website late Tuesday. Square said that it had seen a July recovery in the gross amount of cash its retailer clients were moving across its payment networks.

In a note Wednesday morning, Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Charles Duncan said Novavax’s Covid-19 vaccine appeared to be “more-than-viable, dare we say ‘class-leading.’” J.P. Morgan analyst Eric Joseph said it’s “not too far a stretch to conclude” that the neutralizing antibody activity of the vaccine “looks best-in-class.”

Tuesday evening, the company reported a 147% tumble in its fiscal third- quarter profit. Management estimated that Covid-19 took a nearly $3 billion bite out of Disney’s operating income in the period. Big gains in its streaming segment didn’t make up for losses elsewhere.

The trial liftoff and landing also has the potential to fuel investors’ dreams of finding the next big thing. Space investing and the “low-earth-orbit economy” are still in the early stages of development.

It is a sign that investors have moved on from the disastrous second quarter and are starting to pick winners for the future. Among the companies winning strong reviews for their earnings reports are shale-oil drillers Devon Energy, Pioneer Natural Resources, and Diamondback Energy.

While the broader market has recovered from its March lows—with several stocks notching fresh highs—bank stocks have only slightly trimmed their losses. Even more perplexing, banks and financial stocks are bucking the historical trend of being market leaders following a downturn.

Payroll provider ADP said companies added 167,000 jobs in July, far short of the 1.2 million economists polled by FactSet expected. That follows bigger gains in June and May, when employers added a total of 7.6 million jobs.

Beyond recorded $113 million in second-quarter sales and a per-share loss of 2 cents. Wall Street was looking for $99 million in sales and a similar small loss.

News sent the stock all over the place. Now investors have to figure out what the new business—to be called Kodak Pharmaceuticals—is worth. It isn’t an easy job.

In its statement following a two-day meeting that concluded Wednesday, the Fed’s policy-setting arm, the Federal Open Market Committee, said economic activity and employment have “picked up somewhat in recent months” following sharp declines but “remain well below their levels at the beginning of the year.”

This is going to show up as a massive decline in second-quarter U.S. gross domestic product when the initial cut of the data is released Thursday. The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, for example, estimates that the change in GDP from Q1 to Q2 will be minus 34% at an annual rate, which would vastly outstrip anything in the historical record.

Late Tuesday, the House Judiciary Committee posted the opening statements from the four executives— Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook, and Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook. All four stress that their companies create thousands or even millions of jobs, many for Americans. All talk about the power of entrepreneurship, and all talk about the intensely competitive markets they face. But there are differences in approach that illustrate the positions their companies find themselves in.

GE said it lost 15 cents a share on $17.7 billion in sales. Analysts were looking for a loss of 10 cents on $17 billion in sales. It’s an earnings shortfall, but the company did far better on cash management than expected.

Boeing reported a loss of $4.79 a share on $11.8 billion in sales for the second quarter. Analysts were looking for a loss of $2.57 a share on $13 billion in sales. It’s a huge earnings miss, but the company is still dealing with the twin problems of the 737 MAX grounding and the viral pandemic. The MAX has been grounded world-wide since March 2019 following two deadly crashes inside of five months.

The company lost 56 cents per share from $16.8 billion in sales. Analysts were looking for a loss of $1.77 a share from $16.2 billion in sales. It’s a solid performance relative to expectations. Still, sales fell 55% year over year as the coronavirus pandemic hit auto sales hard. U.S. car sales, for instance, bottomed out in April, falling about 33% year over year in the second quarter.

The stock fell by 2.4% in early trading on Wednesday, to $260.64. Spotify shares are still up 76% this year, on bullish expectations for the company’s podcasting business and hope about new deals with record labels. Spotify doesn’t release details of those deals, though it promoted its new arrangement with Universal Music Group, the world’s largest label. Spotify says the deal includes provisions about a “two-sided marketplace,” where Spotify will offer new tools for Universal’s artists as the streaming company attempts to get labels to pay for things like marketing.

While demand remains elevated compared to last year, the volume of applications dipped week over week, falling 2% on an adjusted basis and 1% on an unadjusted basis. That’s a small drop, but it could be a sign of Covid-19’s impact on first-time buyers, says Mike Fratantoni, the trade group’s senior vice president and chief economist, noting a drop in purchase application volume among those seeking FHA, VA, and USDA home loans.

It isn’t an easy question to answer. There are no analysts covering the company and no target prices to help investors. What’s more, the company is taking a government loan to build a drug-ingredient business. Kodak has been and is in the imaging business. Valuing a huge new business is hard for any investor looking at a company.

Airlines are cutting schedules for the rest of the summer and trimming capacity for the fall as coronavirus cases increase in the U.S. More layoffs are coming too. Budget carrier Spirit Airlines is preparing to furlough 20% to 30% of its staff this fall, according to a memo sent to employees this week. “It’s now clear that the demand increase we saw in June was an outlier, and the downward trend will continue,” CEO Ted Christie said in the memo.

The SEC sent Under Armour a Wells Notice, which is a notification the agency provides a company when it plans to deliver an enforcement action against it. It reflects a preliminary determination, not a final or formal charge. Under Armour said its practices have been appropriate. It said it would pursue the Wells Notice and expects “to engage in a dialogue with the SEC staff to work toward a resolution of this matter.”

The news came a day after the company said that the federal government’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority had committed an additional $472 million to fund the trial, on top of the $483 million it gave the company in April.

Pessina, who was formally named CEO in 2015, has been named executive chairman, and the former executive chairman James Skinner will step down from that role.

The move will affect nearly all of its roughly 200,000 employees across Google’s parent, Alphabet, the WSJ report said. Google had previously told its staff to expect to return to the offices as early as the beginning of January.

New orders for manufactured durable goods, or items meant to last at least three years, climbed 7.3% last month from May, the Commerce Department said Monday. That followed a 15.1% rise in May and topped the 6.5% increase economists polled by FactSet predicted.

According to Reuters, which reported on BMW’s plans, the German car maker plans to have almost five million fully electric vehicles on the road in 10 years. That works out to about 500,000 new EVs sold each year between now and 2030. BMW wasn’t immediately available to comment on the report.

Target on Monday said it will not open stores on Thanksgiving Day this year following a similar decision by Walmart last week. Target said, “this isn’t a year for crowds.” Dick’s Sporting Goods also followed suit.

Sales came in at $860 million, down 29% from the pro-forma figure combining second-quarter 2019 revenues for Hasbro and eOne, the Canadian entertainment company Hasbro bought last year. Wall Street’s consensus estimate called for sales of $985.5 million. The company reported adjusted earnings of 2 cents a share. Wall Street analysts surveyed by FactSet expected an adjusted per-share profit of 22 cents.

Albertsons said it earned $586.2 million, or $1 per share, up from 8 cents per share a year earlier. On an adjusted basis, the company earned $1.35 a share on revenue of $22.75 billion. Analysts were looking for EPS of $1.32 on revenue of $22.71 billion. Digital sales jumped 276% in the quarter, while same-store sales climbed 26.5%. But the company booked $615 million in costs related to the pandemic, including an additional $275 million for front-line workers’ pay, and it also saw some store closures and lower fuel sales.

SAP acquired Qualtrics for $8 billion in January 2019. It said in a statement that its primary objective for the IPO is “to fortify Qualtrics’ ability to capture its full market potential within experience management. This will help to increase Qualtrics’ autonomy and enable it to expand its footprint both within SAP’s customer base and beyond.”

The Labor Department said Thursday that 1.42 million Americans filed for first-time jobless benefits in the week ending July 18 on a seasonally adjusted basis. That’s up from a revised 1.31 million in the prior week, and it’s higher than the 1.3 million economists polled by FactSet had predicted. In recent weeks, what had been a steady decline in claims from a March peak started to stall.

The Mahwah, N.J.-based company said it expects to reduce debt by about $1 billion in its pre-arranged restructuring, providing increased financial flexibility to become profitable. “The meaningful progress we have made driving sustainable growth, improving our operating margins and strengthening our financial foundation has been severely disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic,” Carrie Teffner, the company’s interim executive chair, said in a statement.

American Airlines reported an adjusted loss of $7.82 a share, narrowly beating estimates for a loss of $7.84. Revenue in the quarter fell by 86% to $1.6 billion, beating estimates for $1.4 billion. Southwest, for its part, slightly beat earnings estimates. Revenue trends weakened in July, Southwest said, and the airline said it was re-evaluating its August and September schedules. Lastly, Alaska reported an adjusted loss of $3.54 a share, smaller than the consensus estimate for a $3.78 loss. Revenue declined 82% to $421 million, beating forecasts for $335 million.

Spirit reported an adjusted pretax loss of $364 million in the quarter, resulting in a loss of $3.59 a share, which was worse than the consensus estimate for an adjusted loss of $2.77 a share. Revenue collapsed by 86% to $138.5 million.

The electric vehicle company late Wednesday reported adjusted earnings per share of $2.18, and a profit under generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP, of 50 cents a share. Analysts were looking for results near the break-even line. It’s hard to be more precise because earnings estimates on Tesla have been all over the place for the pandemic-affected second quarter.

The company said monetizable daily active users, or MDAUs, grew to 186 million during the quarter, topping consensus estimates that called for 172 million, according to FactSet.

Chipotle late Wednesday said it earned 29 cents a share, nearly $3 less on a per-share basis than in a year earlier. However, on an adjusted basis, earnings per share were 40 cents, a nickel ahead of the average analyst estimate, according to FactSet. Revenue fell 4.8% to $1.4 billion, above the $1.33 billion consensus estimate.

Given that so many chip makers license Arm’s microprocessor designs, the conventional wisdom has been that an IPO was more likely than an outright sale to a chip company. But on Wednesday, Bloomberg reported that Nvidia in recent weeks approached SoftBank about potentially buying Arm outright.

Kimberly-Clark said it earned $681 million, or $1.99 a share. On an adjusted basis, earnings per share were $2.20, ahead of the $1.80 analysts were predicting. Revenue of $4.61 billion also came in ahead of the $4.46 billion consensus estimate.

The home builder reported earnings per share of $1.29. Adjusted earnings per share was $1.15, beating the analyst consensus of 87 cents, according to FactSet. The company reported 6,522 net new orders. While that is down about 4% from the same quarter in 2019, it is much better than what Wall Street saw coming. Analysts polled by FactSet expected new orders to drop to 4,999, which would have represented a 26.4% drop from a year earlier.

Sales of previously owned homes surged 21% in June from a month earlier, to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.72 million, the National Association of Realtors said Wednesday. That’s a record pace as sales snapped a three-month stretch of declines as mortgage rates tumble.

The closure of the consulate—an unusual and dramatic move—comes after the U.S. accused two hackers in China on Tuesday of targeting U.S. companies working on coronavirus research. In a tweet on Wednesday, Sen. Marco Rubio, acting chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, called the consulate a spy shop and a “central node of the Communist party’s vast network of spies and influence operations in the United States.”

Pfizer and BioNTech said Wednesday that the companies are selling 100 million doses of the vaccine to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Defense for $1.95 billion, a deal that prices each dose of the experimental vaccine at $19.50. The deal allows the U.S. government the option of buying an additional 500 million doses.

Microsoft reported fiscal fourth-quarter earnings of $11.2 billion, or $1.46 a share, on revenue of $38 billion Wednesday, after posting earnings of $1.71 a share on sales of $33.71 billion a year ago. Analysts on average expected profit of $1.34 a share on sales of $36.54 billion, according to FactSet.

Slack contends that Microsoft “has illegally tied its Teams product into its market-dominant Office productivity suite, force installing it for millions, blocking its removal, and hiding the true cost to enterprise customers.”

In a 6 p.m. news release on Tuesday, Biogen said CFO Jeffrey Capello, who has been in the role since December 2017, would step down on Aug. 15. He will be replaced by Michael McDonnell, who is now chief financial officer of Iqvia. The news release didn’t offer a reason for Capello’s departure.

Best Buy said its quarter-to-date sales through July 18 climbed 2.5% year over year, with domestic sales up 2% and international sales rising 8%. However, with store closures and consumer fears about the spread of coronavirus, e-commerce was the star of the show. Best Buy notched a 255% increase in digital sales, with computers, appliances, and tablets among the strongest product categories.

The first of the large internet advertising powerhouses to report earnings, the company’s revenue beat wasn’t enough to overcome advertising growth slowing to 20% amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Snap’s earnings may give investors a clue about what to expect from rivals Alphabet, Facebook, and Twitter, which are all expected to report earnings in the coming weeks.

Hydrogen is the new, new thing for a few reasons. For starters, there is Nikola, the alternative-fuel trucking startup. Its market value has rocketed from less than $1 billion at the start of the year to more than $14 billion. Nikola plans to power heavy-duty trucks with hydrogen-powered fuel cells.

Shares of Jamf opened on the Nasdaq at $46 a share. The stock was at $46.49 in midmorning trade, leaving it $20.49 above the IPO price. The positive showing comes after Jamf raised $468 million late Tuesday.

Chinese fintech giant Ant Group Co., which owns mobile payment network Alipay, plans a dual listing in Hong Kong and on Shanghai’s version of the Nasdaq for its much-anticipated initial public offering.

The IPO of the company, an affiliate of e-commerce giant Alibaba, could also be a harbinger for other big Chinese debuts.

The deal would expand Chevron’s oil and gas reserves by 18% at an average price of less than $5 a barrel of oil reserves, and the companies say they can cut $300 million in annual expenses. Chevron would add to its acreage in Colorado’s DJ Basin, and boost its position in the Permian Basin. Noble’s Israeli gas project—the largest discovery the company has made—is another key asset.

The company saw growth in its cloud and hardware businesses, but a deterioration in services, as some customers in heavily affected markets pushed to cut costs.

The Wall Street Journal reports that a cash-and-stock deal could be announced as soon as Monday. EBay has been shopping the classified-ads unit since February, and Adevinta’s name has come up in the past as a potential buyer. EBay’s classifieds unit, which includes the brands Gumtree and Kijiji, has operations in Canada, Europe, Africa, Australia, and Mexico.

The financial terms weren’t disclosed, and the companies said payments would depend on the size and timing of the deliveries. Despite the lack of detail, investors took the announcement as a sign of confidence in the Covid-19 program.

As part of a deal valued at up to £866 million ($1.09 billion), GlaxoSmithKline will pay £130 million for a nearly 10% stake in CureVac, which also counts the German government as a minority owner.

GlaxoSmithKline and CureVac reached an agreement for the research, development, manufacturing and commercialization of up to five mRNA-based vaccines and monoclonal antibodies targeting infectious disease pathogens.

Now that the official report is here, the data appear promising. Investigators reported only mild and moderate adverse events in subjects who received the vaccination, and said that the vaccine induced neutralizing antibody levels that were similar to those seen in patients who had recovered from Covid-19 infections. They also reported that the vaccine induced T-cell responses, another sort of immune response thought to be important in preventing Covid-19 infections.

Interest has been picking up among potential investors in Asda, the U.K.’s third largest grocer, after Walmart put the sale process on hold during the coronavirus.

Lewis died at the age of 80 following a battle with cancer. As chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Lewis was one of the core organizers of and speaker at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, at which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. He was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1987, and most recently served as chairman of the House Ways and Means Oversight Subcommittee.

In the June quarter reported late Thursday, Netflix added 10.1 million net new subscribers, above the company’s forecast of 7.5 million, but falling short of Wall Street estimates that had reached 12 million or higher. Netflix is forecasting just 2.5 million net adds in the September quarter, well shy of analyst expectations.

New permits were authorized at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.24 million, up 2.1% from May but 2.5% below the year-earlier reading. Single-family permits were granted at a rate of 834,000, up 12%, versus 368,000 permits for multifamily buildings.

The average 30-year fixed-rate mortgage fell to 2.98% for the week ending July 16, the report said, not including fees and points. That marks the first time in 50 years that rates have fallen below 3%, Sam Khater, Freddie Mac’s chief economist, said in a release.

The move, while not a shock, says a lot about the state of the industry—as well as the impact of new airplane models, like the Boeing 737 MAX, on airline operations. British Airways blamed the “devastating impact of the Covid-19 pandemic,” saying air travel demand isn’t expected to hit 2019 levels until 2023 or 2024. Coronavirus has had an unprecedented impact on commercial aerospace, and the industry sees a very slow recovery—save for an efficacious vaccine.

The move was expected, but the stocks of the three big U.S. cruise operators were down midafternoon Friday amid a mostly higher broader market. The cruise companies have been shut down by the pandemic since mid-March. Carnival, however, said recently that it plans to begin sailings from Germany next month.

This week has seen the SPAC boom shift into overdrive, with a flood of merger and initial public offering announcements. And there is plenty more to come.

Analysts tracked by Bloomberg had expected BlackRock to report second-quarter earnings of $6.96, with estimates ranging from $6.37 to $7.61. BlackRock repurchased $1.1 billion of shares during the quarter, and its weighted-average diluted shares fell 1% to 15.7 million shares during the quarter.

That was one of the takeaways of Morgan Stanley analyst Thomas Allen from the SBC Digital North America Summit that ended Thursday. The summit bills itself as the largest online betting and gaming event.

Governance-wise, Vietnam is a mess. Foreign stock ownership is capped. Arcane trading bottlenecks choke liquidity and elevate prices well above what’s listed on the exchange. These and other problems have kept the country in frontier market status, with inclusion in the MSCI emerging market indexes years away, at best.

The last-generation Ghibli went on sale in 2013, and a fairly impressive (for a supercar) 100,000 were sold. But the car was getting rather dated, so the update was long awaited. The new car is what’s called a “mild hybrid,” meaning it gets electric assistance to its two-liter, direct-injected turbo four. Yes, a four-cylinder Maserati.

U.S. retail and food-services sales jumped a seasonally adjusted 7.5% in June, the Census Bureau said Thursday, better than the 5.4% increase economists polled by FactSet predicted. Investors have gotten used to sizable increases in economic gauges from depressed levels in April and May, when the economy was virtually shut down and slowly reopening. But the fact that retail sales rose 1.1% in June from 2019’s level suggests some real strength beyond just favorable month-over-month comparisons.

An additional 928,000 workers sought Pandemic Unemployment Assistance—representing gig workers and others not normally eligible for jobless benefits—in the latest week.

The investment bank reported profits of $3.2 billion, or $1.96 per share, in the second quarter, beating profits of $2.2 billion in the year-earlier period. Revenue popped to $13.4 billion—a $3.2 billion jump from last year.

The bank, led by CEO Brian Moynihan, posted profits of $3.5 billion, or $0.37 a share, beating expectations of earnings of $0.27 per share. But profits were down by more than half from the year-ago quarter, when the bank earned $7.3 billion. Revenue also took a hit in the second quarter, coming in at $22.3 billion, just under the $23.1 billion recorded a year earlier.

The ruling could cause considerable issues for tech companies like Facebook, Alphabet, and Amazon.com that routinely store and process data generated by European customers on U.S. servers, where they could be subject to surveillance by U.S. government authorities. More than 5,000 companies rely on the Privacy Shield agreement for cross-border data transfers.

The company said late Wednesday in a series of tweets that hackers used some form of deception to gain access to its systems and tools normally reserved for employees—and used them to send messages asking for bitcoin from dozens of verified accounts, including those of celebrities, politicians, business tycoons, and some tech giants’ corporate accounts.

Twitter hasn’t yet disclosed details on how the attackers breached its security and exactly what the breach—known as a social-engineering attack—looked like, though it has said it is continuing to investigate the matter. U.S. lawmakers have also raised questions about the attack and asked Twitter to disclose what occurred in detail.

JetBlue and American said their partnership, announced Thursday, will include code-sharing and network cooperation. JetBlue will add more than 60 routes to its network with flights operated by American, expanding JetBlue’s presence across the three major airports in the New York region. JetBlue plans to add flights at LaGuardia and Newark and increase its presence at JFK to connect to international flights run by American.

The retail chain will mandate face coverings to help prevent the spread of coronavirus for all store visitors except for those with underlying medical conditions and young children starting on Aug. 1, a Target spokesperson said in a statement to Barron’s.

Yet sales were $18.3 billion for the quarter, 10.8% less than the same quarter last year. Shares of Johnson & Johnson traded lower for much of Thursday’s session but moved into positive territory late in the session.

The restaurant chain crushed second-quarter earnings estimates on Thursday. Domino’s earned $2.99 a share from $920 million in sales. Analysts were looking for $2.25 a share from $912 million in sales. It is the largest earnings “beat” since, well, the first quarter, when earnings exceeded analyst estimates by 32%. U.S. same-store sales, a key metric for any retail operation, advanced more than 16% year over year.

The vaccine “induced anti–SARS-CoV-2 immune responses in all participants, and no trial-limiting safety concerns were identified,” says a New England Journal of Medicine paper published on Tuesday evening. “These findings support further development of this vaccine.”

The brief article, which appeared early Wednesday on the website of the British television network ITV, was by Robert Peston, ITV News’ political editor. Peston writes that The Lancet will publish positive news on the Oxford vaccine, and that the paper will show that the vaccine elicited both antibody and T-cell responses in study participants.

Even though Apple and the Irish government, which had appealed the decision, rejoiced at the ruling, this may not be quite the end of the legal story. The Commission has the right to appeal to the Court of Justice of the European Union—the EU’s highest court—and it may take another few years before a final ruling is issued.

Goldman Sachs saw net revenue of $13.3 billion for the quarter ending June 30, blowing past analysts’ estimates of $9.8 billion and marking the bank’s second-highest quarterly revenue ever. Earnings per share totaled $6.26, again eclipsing Wall Street’s projections of $3.78 a share, as well as the profit of $5.81 a share from the same quarter a year ago. The strong result was largely the result of increased trading activity amid the volatility of the second quarter.

The beige-book report, prepared based on information collected by regional Fed banks on or before July 6, gives investors an anonymized glimpse of the economy from businesses at the ground level. As lockdowns lifted and businesses reopened, many respondents reported that demand picked up and prompted hiring. But as the coronavirus continues to spread and threatens reopenings, businesses remain worried about the magnitude of the pandemic’s economic implications.

Industrial production climbed 5.4% while manufacturing output jumped 7.2% in June from a month earlier, the Federal Reserve said Wednesday. Economists expected increases of 4.3% and 5.5%, respectively, according to FactSet. In May, those rates were 1.4% and 3.9%, respectively.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York said its Empire State manufacturing index, comprising survey results collected July 2 through July 9, rose for the first time since the pandemic took hold in the U.S. as demand sprang back. It came in at a better-than-expected 17.2 for July, breaking a streak of contracting activity that included record lows in May and April. Economists surveyed by FactSet predicted an improvement to 10 from minus 0.2 in June.

Brent crude, the global benchmark, settled 2.1% higher to $43.79 on Tuesday, as West Texas Intermediate crude prices settled up by 2.3% to $41.20. Oil stocks were rising, with U.S. producer Diamondback Energy up 1.3%.

OPEC and its allies, a group known as OPEC+ that includes Russia, agreed to boost production by 2 million barrels a day in August. That would leave the group’s production of 7.7 million barrels below normal levels, rather than its current 9.7 million barrel cut. The production increase threatens to result in another oil glut, but OPEC ministers have said that the production increase will be buffered by more cuts from countries like Iraq that didn’t comply with the group’s prior deal.

“The Company expects these results will be offset in the quarters ahead by…the resumption of deferred care and future COVID-19 cost and economic impacts,” UnitedHealth Group said. Demand for care had hit relatively normal levels by the end of the second quarter, after falling dramatically from mid-March through April, the company said.

Beyond Meat products will start off in 19 St. Marche locations across São Paulo. St. Marche is owned by private-equity firm L Catterton.