Designers come out for Apple in patent fight with Samsung

Technology

Apple Inc (O:AAPL) deserved the hundreds of millions of dollars in damages Samsung Electronics Co Ltd (KS:005930) paid for infringing patented designs of the iPhone, because the product's distinctive look drives people to purchase it, a group of design industry professionals told the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday.

Setting up a clash with a number of Silicon Valley companies that have come out on the side of Samsung, more than 100 designers and educators signed on to a new court brief supporting Apple.

They include famous fashion names Calvin Klein, Paul Smith and Alexander Wang, the industrial design director at Parsons School of Design, the design director for Bentley Motors, and Tony Chambers, the editor-in-chief of Wallpaper magazine.

Samsung has appealed to the Supreme Court part of the $548 million it paid Apple last December related to a jury verdict from 2012. Samsung says the $399 million of that amount, awarded for copying the designs of the iPhone's rounded-corner front face, bezel and grid of icons, is excessive, adding that they contributed only marginally to a complex product.

Apple sued in 2011, claiming the South Korean electronics company stole its technology and the look of the iPhone.

Last May, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington upheld the 2012 patent infringement verdict but overturned Samsung's liability for trademark infringement.

Samsung asked the Supreme Court to review the case, and in March, the justices agreed to examine whether the total profits from a product that infringes a design patent should be awarded if the patent applies only to a component of the product.

The designers on Thursday said that in the minds of consumers, the "look of the product comes to represent the underlying features, functions, and total user experience."

Stealing a design can lead to a lost sale, and Apple deserves to be compensated for that with the infringer's entire profits, they said.

Samsung has had a number of trade groups come out on its side, including The Internet Association as well as Silicon Valley heavyweights Facebook Inc (O:FB) and Alphabet Inc (O:GOOGL) unit Google, which makes the Android operating system used in Samsung's phones.

If not reversed, the Federal Circuit decision "could lead to diminished innovation, pave the way for design troll patent litigation and negatively impact the economy and consumers," Samsung spokeswoman Danielle Meister Cohen said in an email on Thursday.

The case is Samsung Electronics Co Ltd v. Apple Inc, in the Supreme Court of the United States, No. 15-777.

Source by Reuters

Gold inches up following BOE rate cut, ahead of U.S. jobs report

Commodities

Gold ticked up on Thursday, remaining near 28-month highs, as investors looked past a highly telegraphed interest rate cut from the Bank of England placing a greater focus on the U.S. monthly job report set to be released at week's end.

On the Comex division of the New York Mercantile Exchange, Gold for December delivery traded between $1,355.25 and $1,371.35 an ounce before settling at $1,367.05, up 2.35 or 0.17% on the session. With the slight declines, Gold closed higher for the seventh time over the last eight sessions. Since opening the year near $1,075 an ounce, Gold has soared approximately 29% over the last six months and is on pace for one of its strongest years in a decade.

Gold likely gained support at $1,337.50, the low from July 20 and was met with resistance at $1,391.40, the high from March 14, 2014.

On Thursday morning, the Bank of England as expected lowered its benchmark interest rate by 25 basis points to a record-low of 0.25%, representing its first interest rate cut in seven years. Notably, the BOE increased its asset purchasing by GBP 60 billion, outlined a plan to begin buying GBP 10 billion of corporate bonds per month and announced an initiative for providing as much as GBP 100 billion to banks under a comprehensive term funding scheme. "We have launched a timely, coherent and comprehensive package," BOE governor Mark Carney said.

At the same time, the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) increased its near-term inflation outlook on Thursday, due primarily to the recent depreciation of the Pound Sterling. By year's end, the MPC expects inflation to reach 0.8%, up from previous estimates of 0.4%. The MPC also anticipates that inflation will increase to 1.9% by the end of 2017 and overshoot its 2% target in December, 2018. Carney emphasized that additional rate cuts and further easing measures could be forthcoming if the figures in Thursday's inflation forecast wind up being accurate. GBP/USD plummeted more than 1.5% in response to the rate decision, falling to an intraday low of 1.3112. The Pound has plunged nearly 12% against the Dollar since U.K. voters decided to leave the European Union in a historic referendum on June 24.

The U.S. Dollar Index, which measures the strength of the greenback versus a basket of six other major currencies, gained more than 0.20% to an intraday high 95.87. The index is still sharply below four-month highs of 97.62 from early last week. Dollar-denominated commodities such as Gold become more expensive for foreign purchasers when the dollar appreciates.

Silver for September delivery fell 0.039 or 0.19% to 20.432 an ounce.

Copper for September delivery lost 0.025 or 1.11% to 2.175 a pound.

Sourse by Investing.com

Oil jumps 2 percent, U.S. crude firmly over $40 on short-covering

Commodities

Oil prices rose more than 2 percent on Thursday, with U.S. crude advancing firmly above the $40-per-barrel mark on short-covering and after a modest stockpile drop at the delivery hub for U.S. crude futures.

It was a second straight day of gains for crude futures from April lows below $40, after Wednesday's 3 percent run-up powered by data showing a hefty U.S. gasoline inventory drawdown.

Market intelligence firm Genscape reported that stockpiles at the Cushing, Oklahoma delivery hub for U.S. crude futures fell 89,071 barrels during the week to Aug. 2, traders who saw the data said. The Genscape report came after U.S. government data on Wednesday showed a 1.1 million-barrel decline at the Cushing hub in the week to July 29

Sources said BP PLC (L:BP) was restarting units at its 413,500-barrel per day refinery in Whiting, Indiana, and added momentum to the crude rally, according to traders. The weekend outage of the reformer and blending oil unit had prompted BP to cut production by between 20 and 25 percent.

Brent crude (LCOc1) was up $1.05, or 2.5 percent, at $44.15 a barrel by 12:59 p.m. EDT.

U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude (CLc1) rose $1.10, or 2.7 percent, to 41.93 per barrel, gaining more than $1 at the session peak. On Wednesday, WTI settled up more than $1.30, or 3 percent.

"With WTI testing $40 lately and without follow through selling, short positions are likely booking profits and we could see range bound prices after this," said Chris Jarvis, analyst at Caprock Risk Management in Frederick, Maryland.

Speculators, including hedge funds, added the equivalent of 56 million barrels of extra short positions in the three main Brent and WTI futures and options contracts in the week ending July 26, data said.

U.S. refined oil product futures also rallied, with ultra-low sulfur diesel (HOc1) up over 2 percent and gasoline (RBc1) rising nearly 1 percent.

WTI's drop below $40 earlier this week had hardened the resolve of oil market bears to drive prices lower as oversupply, refining cutbacks and a breakdown in the oil/dollar trade appeared to spell an end to this year's rally.

Data from Iraq's state oil marketer showed the OPEC member's July crude production at its highest since January at 4.6 million barrels per day.

Stockpiles of middle distillates in Singapore were at a five-year high year, adding to worries of a worldwide petroleum glut.

The Cushing draw aside, total U.S. crude stocks rose for a second straight week, gaining 1.4 million barrels last week, contrary to analysts' forecasts for an identical draw.

"Our long standing WTI-Brent targets of $37-38 remain as high probability and position type shorts represent a hold," said Jim Ritterbusch of Chicago-based oil markets consultancy Ritterbusch & Associates.

Source by Reuters

Facebook's News Feed to show fewer 'clickbait' headlines

Technology

Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) Inc's News Feed will show fewer "clickbait" headlines over the next few weeks, the company announced Thursday, as it seeks to establish itself as the prime web destination for news and social updates.

The company receives thousands of complaints a day about clickbait, headlines that intentionally withhold information or mislead users to get people to click on them, Adam Mosseri, vice president of product management for News Feed, said in an interview.

In an effort to eliminate clickbait from the site, Facebook created a system that identifies and classifies such headlines. It can then determine which pages or web domains post large amounts of clickbait and rank them lower in News Feed.

Facebook routinely updates its algorithm for News Feed, the place most people see postings on the site, to show users what they are most interested in and encourage them to spend even more time on the site.

"What we hope is this will create incentives for publishers to post less clickbait," Mosseri said. "We tried to be very concrete about what we defined as clickbait."

The 1.7 billion-person site has worked to better communicate how it shows news and posts to users in recent months, after a May news report alleged liberal political bias in a Facebook feature called Trending Topics.

The system looks for commonly used phrases in clickbait headlines, similar to how filters for email spam work, Facebook said in a blog post. It categorized tens of thousands of headlines as clickbait by looking for headlines that intentionally withheld information and those that exaggerated the content of an article.

News Feed, a team of about 200 people, uses a similar classification system to determine what it should show each user, Mosseri said.

Source by Reuters

Allergan's cash-use plan, pipeline could add to share run

Business

Four months after the collapse of its deal to be bought by Pfizer(N:PFE), Allergan plc (N:AGN) has a $33 billion war chest, a pipeline of experimental drugs that some investors view as undervalued and optimistic shareholders scooping up its shares.

Whether the stock's recent rebound continues could rest on how wisely the drugmaker deploys that money. Wall Street could get a glimpse of Allergan's plans when it reports second-quarter results on Monday.

"A lot of the strategic focus is going to be on what they do with this cash infusion," said Kevin Kedra, an analyst with Gabelli & Co.

One possibility is Allergan strikes a major purchase of its own. It was reported this week to be interested in buying Biogen (O:BIIB), which has a market value around $70 billion.

While some analysts say the company does not need to strike such a sizable deal, they are bracing for some level of deal-making, along with share buybacks and the paydown of debt.

Allergan's newfound cash bounty stems from the sale of its generic drugs business to Teva Pharmaceutical (NYSE:TEVA) Industries (TA:TEVA).

Helped in part by the sale, which closed on Tuesday after some doubts it would win U.S. antitrust approval, Allergan shares have climbed 10 percent since the end of June, topping a 3.5 percent rise for the NYSE Arca Pharmaceutical index (DRG) of large and specialty drugmakers. They have rebounded about 30 percent since sinking to a two-year low at the start of May and traded at midday on Thursday at $255.02, up $2.49, or 0.99 percent, on the New York Stock Exchange.

Even after bouncing back, the shares remain down almost 20 percent for 2016, hurt after the Pfizer deal fell apart in April over new U.S. tax rules.

Led by deal-making Chief Executive Officer Brent Saunders and armed with its top-selling Botox drug, known for smoothing wrinkles, Allergan's earnings per share are expected to rise 14 percent on average annually through 2019 on annual revenue growth of 8.7 percent, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

With the recent rebound, the shares are trading at about 15.8 times earnings estimates for the next 12 months. That is slightly pricier than their three-year average of 15.3 times, but well below valuations for shares of other pharmaceutical companies with strong growth expectations, such as Bristol-Myers Squibb (N:BMY) and Eli Lilly (N:LLY).

To merit a higher valuation, Allergan must improve its pipeline of experimental medicines, said Guggenheim Securities analyst Louise Chen, who rates the stock "neutral."

"They are going to need some sort of biotech assets or something that is going to be a bigger hook for people than what they currently have," Chen said.

Other analysts and investors tout the company's current pipeline and say it is not fully represented in the stock. Drugs for uterine fibroids, dry eye, major depressive disorder and migraines are among those "not getting the credit they deserve" for their potential, said Brian Turner, principal at Allergan shareholder Levin Capital Strategies.

"They already have an existing pipeline," Turner said. "The growth will be there. So they don’t need to do anything transformative."

Source by Reuters

U.S. economy seen growing 3.7 percent in third quarter: Atlanta Fed

Economy

The U.S. economy likely expanded at a 3.7 percent annualized rate in the third quarter, compared with government's advance reading of second-quarter growth at 1.2 percent last Friday, the Atlanta Federal Reserve's GDP Now forecast model showed on Thursday.

The latest third-quarter GDP estimate was a tad faster than the 3.6 percent figure calculated on Wednesday, the regional Fed said on its website.

Source by Reuters

U.K. stocks higher at close of trade; Investing.com United Kingdom 100 up 1.66%

Stock market

U.K. stocks were higher after the close on Thursday, as gains in the Industrial Metals & Mining, Life Insurance/Assurance and Tobacco sectors led shares higher.

At the close in London, the Investing.com United Kingdom 100 added 1.66%.

The best performers of the session on the Investing.com United Kingdom 100 were AvivaPLC (LON:AV), which rose 6.70% or 25.800 points to trade at 410.800 at the close. Meanwhile, Inmarsat PLC (LON:ISA) added 6.21% or 48.50 points to end at 829.00 andStandard Chartered PLC (LON:STAN) was up 5.16% or 31.700 points to 646.000 in late trade.

The worst performers of the session were Hikma Pharmaceuticals PLC (LON:HIK), which fell 16.79% or 448.00 points to trade at 2220.00 at the close. Randgold Resources Ltd (LON:RRS) declined 3.84% or 345.00 points to end at 8635.00 and Next PLC (LON:NXT) was down 2.62% or 140.00 points to 5200.00.

Rising stocks outnumbered declining ones on the London Stock Exchange by 1487 to 583 and 509 ended unchanged.

Gold for December delivery was up 0.28% or 3.85 to $1368.55 a troy ounce. Elsewhere in commodities trading, Crude oil for delivery in September rose 2.30% or 0.94 to hit $41.77 a barrel, while the October Brent oil contract rose 1.97% or 0.85 to trade at $43.95 a barrel.

GBP/USD was down 1.48% to 1.3128, while EUR/GBP rose 1.36% to 0.8482.

The US Dollar Index was up 0.18% at 95.66.

Source by Investing.com

Germany stocks higher at close of trade; DAX up 0.57%

Stock market

Germany stocks were higher after the close on Thursday, as gains in theTechnology, Industrials and Basic Resources sectors led shares higher.

At the close in Frankfurt, the DAX gained 0.57%, while the MDAX index climbed 0.65%, and the TecDAX index gained 0.85%.

The best performers of the session on the DAX were Siemens AG NA (DE:SIEGn), which rose 4.49% or 4.350 points to trade at 101.150 at the close. Meanwhile, Infineon Technologies AG NA O.N. (DE:IFXGn) added 2.88% or 0.400 points to end at 14.305 and Thyssenkrupp AG O.N. (DE:TKAG) was up 2.06% or 0.405 points to 20.075 in late trade.

The worst performers of the session were Beiersdorf AG O.N. (DE:BEIG), which fell 4.19% or 3.560 points to trade at 81.440 at the close. Adidas AG NA O.N. (DE:ADSGN) declined 1.96% or 2.900 points to end at 145.000 and Deutsche Boerse AG (DE:DB1Gn) was down 0.46% or 0.340 points to 73.670.

The top performers on the MDAX were Bilfinger SE O.N. (DE:GBFG) which rose 6.66% to 27.630, Rheinmetall AG (DE:RHMG) which was up 3.31% to settle at 64.000 and Steinhoff International Holdings NV (DE:SNHG) which gained 3.29% to close at 5.81.

The worst performers were Hannover Rueck SE (DE:HNRGn) which was down 4.76% to 86.800 in late trade, Talanx AG NA O.N. (DE:TLXGn) which lost 2.22% to settle at 26.190 and Axel Springer SE (DE:SPRGn) which was down 2.03% to 46.205 at the close.

The top performers on the TecDAX were Nordex SE O.N. (DE:NDXG) which rose 5.41% to 24.365, Nemetschek AG O.N. (DE:NEKG) which was up 4.28% to settle at 55.830 and Slm Solution G (DE:AM3D) which gained 3.09% to close at 23.67.

The worst performers were CompuGroup Medical AG O.N. (DE:COPMa) which was down 2.34% to 37.500 in late trade, SMA Solar Technology AG (DE:S92G) which lost 1.19% to settle at 43.495 and Cancom SE O.N. (DE:COKG) which was down 1.15% to 45.545 at the close.

Rising stocks outnumbered declining ones on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange by 600 to 274 and 21 ended unchanged.

Shares in Siemens AG NA (DE:SIEGn) rose to 52-week highs; rising 4.49% or 4.350 to 101.150. Shares in Steinhoff International Holdings NV (DE:SNHG) rose to all time highs; up 3.29% or 0.18 to 5.81.

The DAX volatility index, which measures the implied volatility of DAX options, was unchanged 0.00% to 17.92.

Gold for December delivery was up 0.28% or 3.85 to $1368.55 a troy ounce. Elsewhere in commodities trading, Crude oil for delivery in September rose 2.30% or 0.94 to hit $41.77 a barrel, while the October Brent oil contract rose 1.97% or 0.85 to trade at $43.95 a barrel.

EUR/USD was down 0.13% to 1.1135, while EUR/GBP rose 1.36% to 0.8482.

The US Dollar Index was up 0.18% at 95.66.

Source by Investing.com