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Facebook rebrands Libra wallet Calibra to Novi

When Facebook unveiled Libra, its cryptocurrency project, there were two distinct entities — the Libra Association, a not-for-profit that oversees all things Libra, and Calibra, a Facebook subsidiary that is building a Libra-based wallet with integrations in WhatsApp and Messenger. Today, Facebook announced that Calibra has a new name, Novi.

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  Bluecore raises $50M for its first-party, AI-based marketing automation tools

  TechCrunch
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  A new Android bug, Strandhogg 2.0, lets malware pose as real apps and steal user data

  TechCrunch

Facebook Rebrands its Crypto Wallet

Facebook's (NASDAQ: FB) digital wallet is getting a new name as the social media giant tries to bring its Libra cryptocurrency to the market.  In a blog post, David Marcus, head of the digital wallet, said it's rebranding from Calibra to Novi.

AMC Entertainment Says 'Walking Dead' Spinoff Will Start Airing Later This Year

With the original fan favorite TV series The Walking Dead wrapping up its final season, AMC Entertainment (NYSE: AMC) now has a fairly likely timetable for the franchise to rise from the grave in the spinoff series The Walking Dead: World Beyond. Talking with Hollywood Reporter, AMC's Chief Operating Officer Ed Carroll revealed a probable air date in the fourth quarter of 2020. Both the last episode of The Walking Dead and the start of World Beyond were filmed prior to the coronavirus-related shutdown.

YouTube Deletes Comments Critical of China’s Communist Party

(Bloomberg) -- YouTube has been deleting comments critical of China’s ruling party due to a software flaw, the company said on Tuesday in response to criticism of the practice.Users of the online video giant, a division of Alphabet Inc.’s Google, flagged that certain comments posted below videos critical of the Chinese Communist Party were quickly deleted.“This appears to be an error in our enforcement systems and we are investigating,” a YouTube spokesperson said in an email.The spokesperson said the issue was not the result of a policy change. Some comments posted in Chinese language, such as “communist bandit” and “50-cent party,” a derogatory term for the ruling party, were deleted within seconds. YouTube’s automatic filters eliminate comments that violate company policies. The Verge reported the issue earlier Tuesday.YouTube pulls comments that violate its Community Guidelines, such as spammy, hateful or harassing posts. Human moderators, who are often contractors, help with this. But during the Covid-19 lockdown, these workers have not been coming to the office, leaving YouTube relying more on automated systems to filter out the dross. The company warned in March there would be less content moderation and slower customer support.Read more: Machines Don’t Measure Up as Facebook, Google Workers Stay HomeGoogle removed its search engine from mainland China in 2010, citing security and censorship concerns. A Google project to create a censored search service for the country, called Dragonfly, was killed last year after protests from employees and U.S. politicians.YouTube does not operate in China, but the nation, like others, does ask Google to review some videos running online outside its borders. China’s government issued 127 requests to review 1,601 YouTube video links in the first half of 2019, some of which were related to hate speech and alleged government criticism, according to Google transparency reports. Two videos resulted in “channel termination,” the company said.(Updates with details on moderators in fifth paragraph.)For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

Bank Stocks Are Either Cheap or Signal More Pain

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Something strange happened in the U.S. stock market on Tuesday.No, it wasn’t that the S&P 500 crossed 3,000 for the first time in almost three months, generating a yelp of joy from the White House and groans from Wall Street veterans who remain perplexed at the seeming disconnect between financial markets and the American economy.Rather, the most unusual part of the latest rally is that bank shares clearly led the advance. As of last week, Bloomberg’s 18-company S&P 500 Banks Index was down more than 40% in 2020, trailing the broader stock market by an almost unprecedented degree since the coronavirus pandemic shut down the world’s largest economy. However, the index soared 9% on Tuesday, far and away a bigger gain than any of the other 23 industry groups. A simple ratio of this bank index to the broad S&P 500 shows the extent to which financials have been beaten down so far in 2020 relative to other segments of the stock market. The gauge fell on May 13 to a level seen only twice before in data going back three decades, both in March 2009. The banks swiftly rebounded in the following months as the U.S. recession officially drew to a close in June of that year.As investors weigh the drastic gains on Wall Street against the backdrop of widespread unemployment and shuttered small businesses on Main Street, the performance of bank stocks may prove to be a crucial barometer of whether markets can sustain their exuberance. Few analysts dispute that shares of financial companies are cheap on a relative basis — but sometimes prices are depressed for good reasons. Inexpensiveness alone isn’t a compelling enough reason to expect banks to bounce back as they did in 2009. Instead, perhaps more than any other industry, a lasting rally will come down to investors’ conviction in a sharp and sustained economic recovery.Investors have a few obvious reasons to be wary of U.S. banks. For one, long-term interest rates are near record lows while traders have started to wager on negative short-term rates, even as Federal Reserve officials repeatedly question the policy. All this points to lower net interest income, a crucial metric that reflects the spread between what a company earns on its loans and what it pays on its deposits. Meanwhile, large banks have already halted share buybacks, and minutes from April’s Federal Open Market Committee meeting revealed that policy makers are debating whether they should also restrict their ability to pay dividends to shareholders during the pandemic.Whether those downsides merit a $1 trillion wipeout, akin to the 2008 financial crisis, is not so clear cut. As Bloomberg News’s Lu Wang and Felice Maranz reported, at that time the financial industry’s earnings worsened for eight consecutive quarters, but analysts only expect profit declines to last half as long this time around. Banks are broadly considered to be well capitalized — certainly much more than they were 12 years ago when they had to be bailed out by the government. JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon expressed confidence in mid-April, when the outlook was even more uncertain than today, that the biggest U.S. bank can handle “really adverse consequences.” He said on Tuesday that the U.S. could see a “fairly rapid recovery.”“The government has been pretty responsive, large companies have the wherewithal, hopefully we’re keeping the small ones alive,” he said at a virtual conference hosted by Deutsche Bank AG.It’s far too soon to declare an “all clear” on the economy, but it’s starting to look as if actions from the Fed and Congress at least helped the U.S. clear the low bar of avoiding the worst-case scenario. The numbers are still awful, especially when it comes to unemployment, but data released Tuesday showed an unexpected increase in new-home sales in April compared with those a month earlier. Broadly, Citigroup Inc.’s economic surprise index is off its lows, indicating that recent figures aren’t quite as bad as analysts expected.“The economic data have been so darn grim lately with job losses in the tens of millions that the green shoots of optimism from better consumer confidence and new home sales are welcome,” Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist at MUFG Union Bank NA, wrote on Tuesday. “We still can’t see a V-shaped recovery, but at least this is looking like the shortest recession in history which will be measured in months not years.”If that’s the case, investors will likely look back on the past few weeks as a time when bank stocks became far too cheap compared with other parts of the market. Yet Tuesday’s seemingly huge rally still leaves financial companies worth far less than before the pandemic, and it seems reasonable to expect they’ll remain that way for a while. After all, it’s anyone’s guess just how many loans will end up going bad and saddle banks with losses. There are far more moving parts to JPMorgan’s bottom line than that of, say, Netflix Inc., which fell 3% on Tuesday, the most in almost a month.It’s never a good idea to read too much into one optimistic trading day, especially coming out of a U.S. holiday weekend in which many Americans probably got a taste of “normal” pre-pandemic activities. But on its face, Tuesday looks as if it could be something of a turning point for bank shares. The follow-through will indicate if they were just too cheap to pass up, or if the economy truly is on the mend.This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Brian Chappatta is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering debt markets. He previously covered bonds for Bloomberg News. He is also a CFA charterholder.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinionSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

GoPro Head of Design Left the Company Earlier This Year

(Bloomberg) -- GoPro Inc.’s chief hardware designer Danny Coster left the camera maker earlier this year after joining from Apple Inc.’s design team four years ago.“After nearly four years at GoPro where Danny was instrumental in transforming our design function, Danny decided to take his career expertise and family back to his native New Zealand to begin a new chapter of his life,” a spokesman for San Mateo, California-based GoPro told Bloomberg News. Coster’s last day at the company was in February, the spokesman added.In April, GoPro cut more than 20% of its workforce, shifted its sales strategy away from physical retail to direct-to-consumer, and cut its 2020 financial guidance due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Still, action camera hardware is key to GoPro’s future, and the departure of Coster means the loss of an influential product and design leader.Read more: GoPro Cuts More Than 20% of Workforce, Changes Sales StrategyCoster joined GoPro in 2016 as vice president of design, and his departure from Apple’s famed industrial design team was one of the first for the Cupertino, California-based technology giant. After he moved, several other veteran team members left, including longtime leader Jony Ive.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

Will Netflix Stock Hit $520?

Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX) is on its way to new all-time highs. So says Jefferies analyst Alex Giaimo. Giaimo reiterated his buy rating and $520 target price for Netflix's stock on May 22. His new target implies potential gains of approximately 25% for investors, based on Netflix's current price of $417.

U.S. Homebuilders Defy Expectations With Gain in New-Home Sales

(Bloomberg) -- Last decade, housing crashed the U.S. economy. But in the 2020 pandemic, it could be one of the bright spots.New home sales unexpectedly climbed 0.6% in April to a 623,000 annualized pace, government data showed Tuesday. That was 30% higher than the median forecast in a Bloomberg Survey of economists of 480,000. The news sent the shares of homebuilders surging, with an index that tracks the industry hitting the highest level since March 9.That’s not to say that housing is booming, it’s just performing better than some very low expectations. Mortgage rates near historic lows may be putting a floor under the housing market and construction -- in most of the country -- has been deemed essential so builders have been able to power through.Job losses, meanwhile, are primarily hitting renters who are more likely to be working in lower-paying service and hospitality jobs that were damaged most by social-distancing rules.“If the reopenings continue, housing may provide an upside surprise to the economy this year,” Mark Vitner, senior economist at Wells Fargo.Homebuilder ETF Soars to Pre-Crisis Level on Sales SurpriseUnlike the existing home market, which has seen a big drop in inventory as sellers pull back, builders are accommodating buyers, Vitner said. They’re showing floor plans virtually and even offering drive-thru closings.The stocks of homebuilders have rebounded in recent weeks, beating the gain in the S&P 500 since the start of May.The builders have a long way to go before they’re back at pre-pandemic levels. While sales were up slightly on a seasonally-adjusted basis, they were down 6.2% from a year earlier. And the median sale price fell 8.6% from a year earlier to $309,900.Still, three of four U.S. regions showed stronger home sales in April than a month earlier, reflecting 2.4% gains in the South and Midwest, the Commerce Department’s report showed. Purchases climbed 8.7% in the Northeast and dropped 6.3% in the West.The government’s data measure signed contracts to buy homes. The slight gain in April came after sales dropped the most since 2013 in March, when much of the U.S. economy shut down to stem the spread of coronavirus.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

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  New home sales edge upward in April despite coronavirus stay-at-home orders

  MarketWatch
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  US home price gains quickened in March as sales plunged

  Associated Press

Apple to reopen about 100 U.S. stores, most with curbside pickup

Apple shuttered stores worldwide as the novel coronavirus pandemic spread but has slowly opened them based on local health data. Under Apple's new procedures, stores with walk-in service will require customers and employees to undergo temperature checks and wear masks before entering. Apple will provide masks to customers who have none.

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  California Reopens In-Store Shopping Across the State — but Safety Measures Remain in Place

  Footwear News
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  Queues and limited browsing in store for English shoppers

  Reuters

NYSE president: 'While we are reopening, it is not back to business as usual'

The iconic New York Stock Exchange floor is back open for business. Here is what New York Stock Exchange President Stacey Cunningham told Yahoo Finance.

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  Masked traders return to NYSE floor after shutdown

  Reuters Videos
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  Bell rings but trading floor chaos subdued as NYSE reopens

  Associated Press

Target CEO: 'America was back in our stores shopping' after stimulus checks

Target Chairman and CEO Brian Cornell weighs in on the state of the retailer amidst the coronavirus pandemic in a Yahoo Finance interview.

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  Target CEO: Stimulus checks led Americans to return to stores, shopping across all categories

  Yahoo Finance Video
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  Where Is My Stimulus Check?

  Motley Fool

5 Best Stocks of Dow ETF From Last Week

The Dow Jones gained 3.3% last week, marking its best weekly performance since April 9.

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  Vipshop (VIPS) to Report Q1 Earnings: What's in the Offing?

  Zacks
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  Low Rates, High Costs to Hurt Hancock Whitney's (HWC) Profits

  Zacks

Novavax expects COVID-19 vaccine trial results in July

Biotech firm Novavax has entered its coronavirus vaccine in a Phase 1 clinical trial in Australia — the first in the Southern Hemisphere.

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  Tap the Solid Momentum in These 5 Solid High-Beta Stocks

  Zacks
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  Novavax launches COVID-19 vaccine trial

  Yahoo Finance Video

More Fundamental Investors Are Looking at Bitcoin – Join Today’s Webinar at 4pm EST to Understand Why

Sentieo Data Show Google and Twitter Interest in Bitcoin Doubling So Far This Year Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have played a divisive role in the last few years, but recently, the interest has drawn a far wider investor base. Indeed, Paul Tudor Jones surprised Wall Street earlier this month when he revealed a significant […]

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  Zcash’s First Halving May Solve Its Inflation Problem

  Coindesk
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  Bitcoin Bounce Stalls at $9K Amid 2% Rise in S&P 500 Futures

  Coindesk

The Zacks Analyst Blog Highlights: Bristol-Myers, Roche, AstraZeneca, Merck and Johnson & Johnson

The Zacks Analyst Blog Highlights: Bristol-Myers, Roche, AstraZeneca, Merck and Johnson & Johnson

Zacks Investment Ideas feature highlights: Microsoft and Amazon

Zacks Investment Ideas feature highlights: Microsoft and Amazon

Six Flags Promises a "New Normal" of Masks and Social Distancing When It Reopens Parks in June

The COVID-19 threat hasn't gone away, and that means big changes are coming to the theme park experience.

Could Sirius XM Be a Millionaire-Maker Stock?

Satellite radio veteran Sirius XM (NASDAQ: SIRI) has made millionaires before. Sirius XM saw its annual revenues rise by 86% over the last five years. Pandora added $1.6 billion to Sirius's sales last year.

Amazon Focuses on Carbon Neutrality With 5 New Solar Projects

Amazon's (AMZN) five new renewable projects to bolster its carbon neutrality drive.

3 Dividend Stocks Ideal for Retirees

Dividend stocks are a great option for a retirement account since you're earning income simply for holding shares. The coronavirus pandemic caused many companies to cut or cancel dividends. While other businesses saw substantial revenue declines from the current economic slowdown, there were at least three that delivered revenue and dividend increases in these tough economic times.

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  Why AES (AES) is a Top Dividend Stock for Your Portfolio

  Zacks
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  Should Lazard Ltd (NYSE:LAZ) Be Part Of Your Income Portfolio?

  Simply Wall St.

Google's New Accessibility Features to Drive User Momentum

Alphabet's (GOOGL) Google unveils accessibility options to deliver enhanced user experience to the people with cognitive and physical disabilities.

California Held Back the Promised Reopening Guidelines for Movie Production This Week

Gov. Gavin Newsom was eager to get film studios back in action, but his office respected a more safety-focused attitude from industry insiders.