Tag Archives: bac

Apple Has Been A Loser Since Joining The Dow — That’s Not A Surprise

Apple ( AAPL ) marked its first anniversary on the Dow Jones Industrial Average Friday with a fractional gain. But over the past year, the iPhone titan’s shares have fallen 17.6%, proving critics right when they say that stocks that join the blue-chip index are often past their prime. Ironically, AT&T ( T ), which was kicked out of the blue-chip index to make room for Apple, has risen 14.8% over the past year. Apple has had a tough year. Its Apple Watch has not been a blockbuster, while iPhone sales disappointed in the holiday period and should fall year-over-year in the current quarter. Apple will unveil a new, smaller smartphone at a Monday event, along with other products. But some analysts say that Apple’s event won’t excite . Apple’s slide is hardly unusual. Intel ( INTC ) and Microsoft ( MSFT ) were added to the Dow at the tail end of the dot-com boom. Microsoft marked time for the next 15 years, finally hitting new highs late last year. Intel is still well off its all-time highs. Bank of America ( BAC ) stands out. Added to the Dow in early 2008, its shares crashed 91% over the next year during the financial crisis. The Dow dropped Bank of America in late 2013, only to see its shares shoot up 17% over the following year. Alcoa ( AA ) and Hewlett-Packard, kicked out at the same time as BofA, rose 96% and 73%, respectively, in the next 12 months. But joining the Dow doesn’t have to be the end. Nike ( NKE ), one of the late 2013 additions, popped 17% in the next year and continued to outperform until its December 2015 peak. Nike reports earnings on Tuesday.

Wall Street Banks Declare War On Silicon Valley Mobile Payments

Wall Street banks have declared war on Silicon Valley mobile payments platforms, arming to do battle in the peer-to-peer mobile payments business. As the likes of Square ( SQ ), Facebook ( FB ) and PayPal ( PYPL ) have charged into the uncharted waters of peer-to-peer payments, Wall Street banks have spent five years stitching together an alliance among  JPMorgan Chase ( JPM ), Bank of America ( BAC ), Wells Fargo ( WFC ) and U.S. Bancorp ( USB ) and others,  according to a press release from Early Warning. Early Warning is a real-time payments and authentication firm that will manage clearXchange, a technology that lets bank customers make quick — near-instant — transactions. It now generally takes one to three days to transfer money between banks. Banks had been slow to innovate after the financial crisis, but now “what we are doing now is delivering payments in real time, which is what our customers have asked for,” Mary Harman, managing director for payments at Bank of America, said in an interview with Reuters . The banks are starting to use clearXchange to allow customers to transfer money almost instantly to friends and family. Peer-to-peer payments have been popular among millennials for splitting dinner bills, cab fare and paying rent. Achieving a critical mass fast is important for the banks using clearXchange. The so-called network effects — the value unlocked from having a large customer base — were critical to PayPal’s early success in online payments, for example. PayPal was early to the peer-to-peer market and snapped up the popular Venmo app as a part of its $800 million Braintree acquisition in 2013. Braintree had acquired Venmo in 2012. Last year, Venmo moved $7.5 billion between people, and in January alone it handled $1 billion, PayPal told Reuters. As of Wednesday, only customers at U.S. Bancorp and Bank of America will be able to send money via mobile devices with the clearXchange platform. JPMorgan and Capital One Financial ( COF ) told Reuters they plan to plug in to the platform “later this year.” Citigroup ( C ) is among banks that have not joined the alliance, Reuters said. PayPal stock was up a fraction, near 38, in afternoon trading on the stock market today . The company is an IBD Leaderboard stock. Shares are just below an early entry at 38.62. A conventional buy point lies at 42.65. Square stock was down a fraction Wednesday afternoon, as the company was set to report its Q4 earnings after the close . Investors are likely going to focus on Square Capital, the company’s financial services arm, as an area of growth. Square’s peer-to-peer payments app Square Cash recently added a feature that let customers store money in it, much like a PayPal account already does. Facebook built its peer-to-peer payments play within its Messenger app , and it did so in-house. The company has said Messenger has more than 800 million customers. Facebook stock was up 1% Wednesday afternoon, near 107.

‘Smell tech’ firms sniff out bad breath, alcohol, air pollution

A burgeoning class of consumer electronics devices at CES 2016 features sensors that can analyze your breath for odors and sniff the air around you for pollutants. Let’s call this new group of gadgets “smell tech” for lack of a better term. Portable Breathalyzers One of the pioneers in the field is BACtrack, which has been selling portable breathalyzers for measuring blood alcohol content (BAC) for 12 years. The company’s current device is the $99