BloggingStocks: Today started out strong and stayed positive all day, even if some commented that the highs were not held. The weak dollar helped commodities and helped stocks. A 10.1% October sales rise by the National Association of Realtors by those trying to get ... Read more

• A large run of holiday sales offerings crashed the Ebay (NASDAQ:EBAY) website, causing a major weekend web outage

• Tyson Foods (NYSE:TSN) reported better-than-expected earnings of 28 cents a share, beating Zacks estimates by 2 cents, on revenues of $7.2 billion, which exceeded Zacks estimates of $6.85 billion

• India’s Reliance Industries bid $12 billion in cash for Lyondell Bassell when it exits bankruptcy

• Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) is reportedly in discussions with News Corp. (NASDAQ:NWSA) to "de-index" the firm's news websites from Google (NASDAQ:GOOG)

• Coca-Cola (NYSE:KO) announced plans to more than double the number of its bottling plants in China over the next ten years as part of its goal to triple sales to the country

• Hershey (NYSE:HSY) trust encouraged the firm to counter Kraft's (NYSE:KFT) hostile, $16.2 billion bid with its own, $17 billion offer

• According to S&P most US banks are failing to meet adequacy standards comfortably enough to avoid ratings downgrades. Both HSBC (NYSE:HBC) and Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) showed stronger-than-average balance sheets, with UBS (NYSE:UBS) and Citigroup (NYSE:C) well below average

Zacks Investment Research

This is an update of our "How's the Economy Doing" periodic series. As a reminder, while our our investment strategy focuses on bottom-up analysis of individual companies, we think awareness of overall macroeconomic conditions is helpful since trends that may impact certain companies or sectors. As always, divergent views exist on where the Market and economy are headed. For example, we published our recent "Time to Go to Cash".... Or is It? article on SeekingAlpha.com (here) and had a number of bearish comments.[More...]

Discovery Networks has been on our radar screen for some time. We have missed several opportunities to grab the stock and it kept on moving higher. This time we are looking at the news of Oprah’s move as providing significant upside for the network. It is really a big confirmation for the cable operators (We [...] Related posts:

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eBay has just announced that it has completed the sale of Skype, valuing the company at $2.75 billion. The investor consortium who is the buying party and will control an approximately 70 percent stake is a group led by Silver Lake and includes Joltid (i.e. the group founded by Skype's founders) and certain affiliated parties, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Andreessen Horowitz. As previously announced, eBay received approximately $1.9 billion in cash and a note from the buyer in the principal amount of $125 million. The company retained an approximately 30 percent equity investment in Skype. The company also purchased senior debt securities with a face value of $50 million as part of a Skype debt financing.