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Tim Cook wants investors to ”think different” about Apple: less as a hyper-growth startup-like company and more as a mature but robust technology corporation with the world’s most lucrative dividend.

If Wall Street follows Apple’s famous advertising slogan of old, it may relieve some of the pressure on Apple’s chief executive, quiet investors’ grumbling about its recent share price slide, and buy the company time to do what it says it does best: come up with and market new products.
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The asset management industry’s chief trade group said it would support temporary withdrawal restrictions for US money market mutual funds, but said in comments to regulators Thursday that bigger changes are not needed to help sustain financial markets during crisis.

Standing its ground, the Investment Company Institute reiterated positions it had previously spelled out for the $2.6 trillion industry, and offered few of the compromises presented by some fund sponsors recently.
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By Gabriel Debenedetti

NEW YORK |
Mon Jan 7, 2013 4:24pm EST

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Stocks lost ground on Monday, as investors drew back from recent gains that lifted the SP 500 to a five-year high, in anticipation of sluggish growth in corporate profits.

Shares of financial companies dipped after a group of major U.S. banks agreed to pay a total of $8.5 billion to end a government inquiry into faulty mortgage foreclosures. The KBW bank index .BKX, a gauge of U.S. bank stocks, was down 0.3 percent.

Other sectors were hit as well, most notably energy and utilities. The SP 500 energy sector index .GSPE fell 0.8 percent and the utilities sector .GSPU was off 1.1 percent.

The day’s decline came a session after the SP 500 finished at a five-year high, boosted by a budget deal and strong economic data. The SP 500 rose 4.6 percent last week, the best weekly gain in more than a year.

“It’s a little bit of taking some risk off the table ahead of profit season, you’re not going to see anything all that great” on earnings, said Larry Peruzzi, senior equity trader at Cabrera Capital Markets Inc in Boston.

Earnings are expected to be only slightly better than the third-quarter’s lackluster results, and analysts’ current estimates are down sharply from where they were in October. Fourth-quarter earnings growth is expected to come in at 2.8 percent, according to Thomson Reuters data.

Aluminum company Alcoa Inc (AA.N) begins the reporting season by announcing its results after Tuesday’s market close. Alcoa shares fell 1.7 percent at $9.10.

The Dow Jones industrial average .DJI dropped 50.92 points, or 0.38 percent, to 13,384.29. The Standard Poor’s 500 Index .SPX fell 4.58 points, or 0.31 percent, to 1,461.89. The Nasdaq Composite Index .IXIC lost 2.84 points, or 0.09 percent, to 3,098.81.

Ten mortgage servicers – including Bank of America (BAC.N), Citigroup (C.N), JPMorgan (JPM.N), and Wells Fargo (WFC.N) – agreed on Monday to pay $8.5 billion to end a case-by-case review of foreclosures required by U.S. regulators.

In a separate case, Bank of America also announced roughly $11.6 billion of settlements with mortgage finance company Fannie Mae and a $1.8 billion sale of collection rights on home loans.

The bank also entered into agreements with Nationstar Mortgage Holdings (NSM.N) and Walter Investment Management (WAC.A) to sell about $306 billion of residential mortgage servicing rights.

Bank of America shares lost 0.2 percent at $12.09 while Nationstar Mortgage Holdings (NSM.N) jumped 16.8 percent to $38.83.

Citigroup shares were up 0.09 percent to $42.47, and Wells Fargo shares fell 0.5 percent to $34.77.

“The financials probably have the wind behind them now with a lot of the regulations coming out … the market has to absorb a lot of the gains, and for that reason there’s a pullback from this level,” said Warren West, principal at Greentree Brokerage Services in Philadelphia.

Shares of U.S. jet maker Boeing Co (BA.N) dropped 2 percent after a Boeing 787 Dreamliner aircraft with no passengers on board caught fire at Boston’s Logan International Airport on Monday morning.

Amazon.com (AMZN.O) shares hit their highest price ever at $269.22 after Morgan Stanley raised is rating on the stock. Shares were up 3.6 percent at $268.46.

Video-streaming service Netflix Inc (NFLX.O) shares gained 3.4 percent to $99.20 after it said it will carry previous seasons of some popular shows produced by Time Warner’s (TWX.N) Warner Bros Television.

Walt Disney Co (DIS.N) stock fell 2.3 percent to $50.97. The company started an internal cost-cutting review several weeks ago that may include layoffs at its studio and other units, three people with knowledge of the effort told Reuters.

Volume was lower than average, as 4.78 billion shares were traded on the New York Stock Exchange, NYSE MKT and Nasdaq. This is well below the 2012 average of 6.42 billion per session.

Declining stocks outnumbered advancing ones on the NYSE by 1,629 to 1,363, while on the Nasdaq decliners beat advancers 1,438 to 1,066.

(Reporting By Gabriel Debenedetti; Editing by Kenneth Barry and Nick Zieminski)

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By Chuck Mikolajczak

NEW YORK |
Fri Jan 4, 2013 2:52pm EST

NEW YORK (Reuters) – U.S. stocks advanced on Friday, putting the SP 500 on track for its biggest weekly gain in over a year after a jobs report showed employers kept the pace of hiring steady in December.

The Labor Department said payrolls outside the farming sector grew by 155,000 jobs last month, slightly below November’s level. Gains in employment were distributed broadly throughout the economy, from manufacturing and construction to healthcare.

Also helping to keep equities afloat was data from the Institute for Supply Management showing U.S. service sector activity expanding the most in 10 months.

“It feels like the economy, we’re not burning the barn down, but we are doing fine – we seem to be growing and the fiscal cliff does not seem to have weighed too much on December employment,” said Paul Mendelsohn, chief investment strategist at Windham Financial Services in Charlotte, Vermont.

The SP 500 index’s weekly gain would be its largest since December 2011. The majority of the gains were achieved earlier in the holiday-shortened week, including the largest daily gain for the benchmark SP index in more than a year on Wednesday, after a deal was struck in Washington to avert the “fiscal cliff.”

“So far there is nothing that has come out that has been negative following the push, they tried to read into the Fed minutes yesterday and take it down but so far they haven’t had much success,” Mendelsohn said.

But a drag on Apple Inc (AAPL.O) shares, down 2.6 percent to $528.36, kept the Nasdaq near the uchanged mark, as the iPhone maker continued its downward path of recent months.

Adding to concerns about Apple’s ability to produce more innovative products, rival Samsung Electronics Co Ltd (005930.KS) is expected to widen its lead over Apple in global smartphone sales this year with growth of 35 percent. Market researcher Strategy Analytics said Samsung had a broad product lineup.

The Dow Jones industrial average .DJI gained 28.46 points, or 0.21 percent, to 13,419.82. The Standard Poor’s 500 Index .SPX rose 5.47 points, or 0.37 percent, to 1,464.84. The Nasdaq Composite Index .IXIC added 2.50 points, or 0.08 percent, to 3,103.07.

The CBOE Volatility index .VIX, a measure of investor anxiety, was on pace for its fourth straight decline, a drop of nearly 40 percent which has pushed the index to its lowest level since September.

Eli Lilly and Co (LLY.N) was among the biggest boost’s to the SP, up 3.5 percent to $51.47 after the pharmaceuticals maker said it expects its 2013 earnings to increase to $3.75 to $3.90 per share, excluding items, from $3.30 to $3.40 per share in 2012.

Fellow drugmaker Johnson Johnson (JNJ.N) rose 1.2 percent to $71.55 after Deutsche Bank upgraded the Dow component to a “Buy” from a “Hold” rating. The NYSEArca pharmaceutical index .DRG climbed 0.4 percent.

Shares of Mosaic Co (MOS.N) gained 2.7 percent to $58.29. Excluding items, the fertilizer producer’s quarterly earnings beat analysts’ expectations, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

The rise in payrolls shown by the jobs data did not make a dent in the still-high U.S. unemployment rate, but it calmed fears about the possibility of the U.S. Federal Reserve ending its highly stimulative monetary policy.

Concerns about the duration of the Fed’s stimulus program prompted a pull-back from the market Thursday after a rally.

Minutes from the Fed’s December policy meeting, released Thursday, showed Fed officials were increasingly worried about the risks of asset purchases to financial markets, though they looked set to continue with the open-ended stimulus program for now.

(Reporting by Chuck Mikolajczak; Editing by Nick Zieminski)

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SYDNEY |
Mon Dec 31, 2012 1:07am EST

SYDNEY (Reuters) – Several major Asian stock indexes closed on Monday with the strongest annual gains in years, but these were overshadowed by the lack of progress in talks to avert the looming U.S. “fiscal cliff”.

Australian shares ended up 14.6 percent in 2012, the best yearly gain since the recovery of 2009. On Monday the benchmark SP/ASX 200 index .AXJO fell 22.4 points to 4,648.9, according to the latest data. It rose 0.5 percent to 4,671.3 on Friday, its highest close since June 2, 2011.

Hong Kong shares ended their best year since 2009 hovering near 18-month closing highs on Monday. The Hang Seng Index .HSI closed flat at 22,656.9 on the day, ending the session up 22.9 percent on the year, near its highest close since early July 2011.

The Straits Times Index (STI) .FTSTI ended down 0.8 percent at 3,167.78 points, but it has gained 20.6 percent since the start of the year, its best yearly gain since 2009, when it surged 64 percent.

Monday’s strong closes came during New Year market holidays in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines and Vietnam, with half-day trading in Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore.

Japan’s Nikkei 225 .N225 ended 2012 trading on Friday up 23 percent, Seoul’s KOSPI 200 .KS11 closed up 9.4 percent on the year, and Taiwan was up 9 percent.

The gains drove the MSCI Asia Pacific ex-Japan’s .MIWD00000PUS to a 12.6 percent rise this year.

Investors fear these gains may be short-lived as the U.S. Congress and the White House struggle to find compromises that could avert the fiscal cliff – harsh tax rises and spending cuts that take effect from New Year’s Day.

SP 500 futures were up 3.7 points, or 0.3 percent, to 1,387.70 in electronic trading at 0500GMT, but traders said the rise in the futures market did not necessarily bode well for a Wall Street rally on Monday after the cash market and futures markets closed far apart on Friday.

“Hard to predict how or when there will be a deal, but I believe investors will show their displeasure tomorrow by selling stocks if there is no deal,” said Mohannad Aama, managing director at Beam Capital Management, an investment advisory firm in New York.

In Washington, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said the Senate would resume sitting at 11 a.m. Washington time on Monday (1600 GMT), to continue discussions, but there were still significant differences between the two sides.

The U.S. dollar last stood at 85.78 yen, having retreated from Friday’s high of 86.64 yen, which was the greenback’s strongest level versus the Japanese currency since August 2010.

As the year draws to a close, the dollar is up about 11.9 percent against the yen, putting it on track for its biggest percentage gain versus the Japanese currency since 2005.

The euro inched up 0.14 percent to 1.323 on Monday. An agreement on the U.S. budget would be viewed as positive for riskier currencies such as the euro and Australian dollar, while a deadlock is deemed positive for the haven and highly liquid dollar.

The Australian dollar was around $1.0383, from $1.0375 in late New York on Friday. It touched a one-month low of $1.0345 last week, but is on track to finish up 1.4 percent this year.

The Aussie dollar was supported by a bounce in iron ore prices .IO62-CNI=SI, which hit eight-month highs at $139.40. Prices are now up 61 percent from the lows hit in September.

Gold was $1661.34 an ounce by 0525 GMT, up around 6 percent for the year and is on track for a 12th consecutive year of gains on rock-bottom interest rates, concerns over the financial stability of the euro zone, and diversification into bullion by central banks.

U.S. crude futures slipped on Monday for a third consecutive session on the budget crisis, with failure to reach a solution seen likely to cause a large drop in fuel consumption.

U.S. crude for February delivery was $90.83 a barrel by 0525 GMT. Front-month prices are on track to post an 8 percent fall in 2012, after three consecutive annual gains. Brent crude slipped 23 cents to $110.39 a barrel, but is set to post a 2.8 percent year-on-year increase in 2012, up for a fourth consecutive year.

(Reporting By Reuters Markets Team; Writing by Eric Meijer; Editing by Matt Driskill)

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