MSFT - Microsoft Corporation
| Previous close | 149.62 |
| Open | 149.40 |
| Bid | 149.56 x 800 |
| Ask | 149.57 x 1300 |
| Day's range | 148.51 - 149.76 |
| 52-week range | 93.96 - 151.33 |
| Volume | 10,657,284 |
| Avg. volume | 22,813,109 |
| Market cap | 1.141T |
| Beta (3Y monthly) | 1.23 |
| PE ratio (TTM) | 28.23 |
| EPS (TTM) | 5.30 |
| Earnings date | 28 Jan 2020 - 3 Feb 2020 |
| Forward dividend & yield | 2.04 (1.36%) |
| Ex-dividend date | 2019-11-20 |
| 1y target est | 160.16 |
- Bloomberg
Bill Gates Touts Benefits of Open Research in AI
Nov.21 -- Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates discussed protectionism in technological research around topics like artificial intelligence. Gates argued that open systems will inevitably win out over closed ones. He speaks with John Micklethwait at Bloomberg's New Economy Forum in Beijing.
- Bloomberg
Google Scoops Up Chunk of Vodafone in Battle With Microsoft and Amazon
Nov.19 -- Google is taking over a chunk of Vodafone Group Plc’s data operations to help make the phone company's operations more efficient. Google is vying with Amazon and Microsoft for dominance in the data center and cloud computing business. Bloomberg's Alistair Barr reports on "Bloomberg Technology."
- Yahoo Finance
Why NFL great Joe Theismann is trading risky stocks
Yahoo Finance talks investing with NFL great Joe Theismann.
- Bloomberg
Microsoft Delays Its AirPods Rival Until After the Key Holiday Season
(Bloomberg) -- Microsoft Corp. delayed the launch of its Surface Earbuds, missing the 2019 holiday shopping season. The software giant is the latest company to stumble in a race to catch up with Apple Inc.’s popular AirPods.The Surface Earbuds will come out in spring 2020, not this year as previously planned. The announcement was made by Panos Panay, the company’s chief product officer, on Twitter.The wireless earbuds were announced earlier this year, and like AirPods, are cord free. The Microsoft version has a circular shape, integrates with a voice assistant and can be used to control Microsoft software like PowerPoint.At $249, the Surface Earbuds are priced the same as Apple’s new AirPods Pro, but the delay means Microsoft will be missing out on a key category this holiday season.Google has also been working to upgrade its wireless earbuds. That product will also be missing this holiday season. The company is aiming for a release in the spring at a price of $179.To contact the reporter on this story: Mark Gurman in San Francisco at mgurman1@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Tom Giles at tgiles5@bloomberg.net, Alistair Barr, Andrew PollackFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
- Zacks
HP (HPQ) to Post Q4 Earnings: What's in Store for the Stock?
HP's (HPQ) fourth-quarter fiscal 2019 results are likely to reflect high demand in the commercial PC market. However, weakness in the Printing business might have posed a threat to the stock.
- Zacks
Should WisdomTree U.S. LargeCap Fund (EPS) Be on Your Investing Radar?
Style Box ETF report for EPS
- Bloomberg
Bill Gates Says Open Research Beats Erecting Borders in AI
(Bloomberg) -- Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates spoke out against protectionism in technological research around topics like artificial intelligence, arguing that open systems will inevitably win out over closed ones.In conversation with Bloomberg News editor-in-chief John Micklethwait at the New Economy Forum in Beijing on Thursday, Gates was skeptical about the idea that ongoing U.S.-China trade tensions could ever lead to a bifurcated system of two internets and two mutually exclusive strands of tech research and development. “It just doesn’t work that way,” said the software pioneer.“AI is very hard to put back in the bottle,” Gates said, and “whoever has an open system will get massively ahead” by virtue of being able to integrate more insights from more sources. Citing Microsoft’s AI research in Beijing, Gates pondered the rhetorical question of whether it was producing Chinese AI or American AI. In the case of Microsoft’s U.K. research campus in Cambridge and the findings it produces, he said that “almost every one of those papers is going to have some Chinese names on it, some European names on it and some Americans’ names on it.”China and the U.S. are the two leading AI superpowers that have dominated research, however cooling political relations between them have slowed the international collaboration that underpins innovation. Huawei Technologies Co., Beijing’s tech champion, has been subject to a variety of sanctions from Washington, in part because China’s rapid AI development is perceived as a rising threat.Gates said he was more worried today than five years ago about the rise of nationalist and protectionist political tendencies across the globe, and that he now wonders whether that will prove a cyclical trend or a more permanent change. Still, as far as the U.S. and China were concerned, he said he’s “even more passionate about the value of engagement than ever.”The other key takeaways from the talk:Gates said there’s “no doubt” solar and wind are key parts of a new energy mix needed to battle climate change. “Quite a bit of nuclear” may be required to fill in for fossil fuels as we move to zero carbon.But he doubts a carbon tax would be realistic in the U.S. Republicans have largely sworn off the idea and, by and large, he said, Democrats aren’t pushing it as a key priority, either.The ability of political leaders to convince their electorates of the benefits and value of globalization has “gone down,” said Gates.The New Economy Forum is being organized by Bloomberg Media Group, a division of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News.To contact the reporters on this story: Vlad Savov in Tokyo at vsavov5@bloomberg.net;John Micklethwait in New York at micklethwait@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Peter Elstrom at pelstrom@bloomberg.net, Colum Murphy, James MaygerFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
- Bloomberg
Kissinger Says U.S. and China in ‘Foothills of a Cold War’
(Bloomberg) -- Terms of Trade is a daily newsletter that untangles a world embroiled in trade wars. Sign up here. Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said the U.S. and China were in the “foothills of a Cold War,” and warned that the conflict could be worse than World War I if left to run unconstrained.“That makes it, in my view, especially important that a period of relative tension be followed by an explicit effort to understand what the political causes are and a commitment by both sides to try to overcome those,” Kissinger told a session of the New Economy Forum. “It is far from being too late for that, because we are still in the foothills of a cold war.”Kissinger said China and the U.S. were countries of a magnitude exceeding that of the Soviet Union and America, and that the world’s two largest economies, who are locked in a protracted trade war, “are bound to step on each other’s toes all over the world, in the sense of being conscious of the purposes of the other.”Solomon on 1MDB, Kissinger Warns on China-U.S. Ties: Live at NEF“So a discussion of our mutual purposes and an attempt to limit the impact of conflict seems to me essential,” he said. “If conflict is is permitted to run unconstrained the outcome could be even worse than it was in Europe. World War 1 broke out because a relatively minor crisis could not be mastered.”Kissinger, 96, said he hoped trade negotiations would provide an opening to political discussions between the two countries.“Everybody knows that trade negotiations, which I hope will succeed and whose success I support, can only be a small beginning to a political discussion that I hope will take place,” he said.QuickTake: How U.S.-China Tech Rivalry Looks Like Cold War 2.0Kissinger spoke hours after Chinese Vice President Wang Qishan addressed the NEF, saying his country was committed to peace and would follow through on policy changes despite facing challenges at home and abroad.“Between war and peace, the Chinese people firmly choose peace. Humanity cherishes peace,” he said. “We should abandon the zero-sum thinking and cold war mentality.”The U.S. and China are trying to assemble a partial trade agreement amid wider tensions ranging from human rights concerns over pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong and the detention of Muslims in China’s Xinjiang region to strategic competition in the South China Sea. Kissinger said he thought a solution to the unrest in Hong Kong was possible, if not likely, and that he hoped it would be resolved via negotiation.The New Economy Forum is being organized by Bloomberg Media Group, a division of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News. Other guests include Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates and former U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson.\--With assistance from Shelly Banjo.To contact Bloomberg News staff for this story: James Mayger in Beijing at jmayger@bloomberg.net;Peter Martin in Beijing at pmartin138@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Brendan Scott at bscott66@bloomberg.net, Karen Leigh, Daniel Ten KateFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
- Financial Times
Hiring more ‘neurodiverse’ workers can pay dividends
Until last October, 28-year-old Carl Nielsen was struggling to stay employed as a coffee shop barista. Nielsen is now working at the Newcastle office of EY after a manager keen on hiring autistic staff became aware of him as part of a recruitment programme the accounting firm has launched to increase what it calls “neurodiversity” in its workforce.
- Bloomberg
China Committed to Peace Despite Challenges, Vice President Says
(Bloomberg) -- A top deputy to Chinese President Xi Jinping reaffirmed China’s commitment to market-based economic reforms, while warning that the international order “was under attack.”Vice President Wang Qishan, who’s one of China’s best known economic reformers, told Bloomberg’s New Economy Forum on Thursday that the country would follow through on policy changes despite facing serious challenges at home and aboard. He said the country would continue to let the market play a “decisive role” in the allocation for resources and stick to the path of peaceful development.“Between war and peace, the Chinese people firmly choose peace. Humanity cherishes peace,” Wang said in his keynote address in Beijing. “We should abandon the zero-sum thinking and cold war mentality.”The New Economy Forum is being organized by Bloomberg Media Group, a division of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News. Other guests include Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates, former U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.Wang’s speech comes as the U.S. and China work to assemble a partial trade agreement, even as broader tensions mount in the U.S.-China relationship from human rights concerns over Hong Kong and the western region of Xinjiang to strategic competition in the South China Sea. The sides are making progress in key areas, according to people close to the talks, even as concerns grow that efforts to nail down the first phase of a broader deal are stalling.U.S. President Donald Trump is expected to sign legislation passed by Congress supporting the Hong Kong protesters, a person familiar said, after the bill was approved unanimously by the Senate on Tuesday and passed the House 417-1 on Wednesday.Trump -- facing an impeachment inquiry at home -- may seek a political win by reaching a trade deal with China. Policy makers in Beijing face their own troubles with a slowing economy at home, as well as factory-price deflation, a fragile financial system and spiraling food costs in the wake of a catastrophic disease epidemic among the nation’s pig herd.“Development must be balanced and inclusive,” Wang said Thursday. “We need to work together to make economic globalization work for all people across the world.”Wang struck a less confrontational tone than when he addressed the same forum last year in Singapore as trade tensions were at a crescendo. In his remarks last year, he both reaffirmed China’s desire to move forward with trade talks and warned that his country wouldn’t again be “bullied and oppressed” by foreign powers.\--With assistance from Dandan Li and Tian Ying.To contact Bloomberg News staff for this story: Peter Martin in Beijing at pmartin138@bloomberg.net;Miao Han in Beijing at mhan22@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Brendan Scott at bscott66@bloomberg.net, Sharon ChenFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
- Zacks
Microsoft to Drive Digital Overhaul of Oil & Gas Enterprises
Microsoft (MSFT) teams up with Baker Hughes (BKR) and C3.ai, to enable oil and gas enterprises with digital transformation.
- Zacks
Everything Investors Need to Know About Disney+
Here is everything investors need to know about Disney+ in under 60 seconds...
- Bloomberg
Amazon Throws Spaghetti at the Grocery Wall
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Amazon.com Inc. loves to tinker and test. Sometimes projects that seemed like mindless fiddling — the Kindle e-reader, the Prime shopping club, its Amazon Web Services cloud-computing operation — turned out to be important advances for the company, its customers and the technology industry.Despite that history, I have to ask: Does Amazon know what it’s doing in groceries?When Amazon agreed to buy the Whole Foods supermarket chain for nearly $14 billion more than two years ago, it was regarded largely as a bold masterstroke. Groceries and other household goods are a magical category of consumer spending, with close to $1 trillion spent in the U.S. each year. The combination of large spending, the frequency of grocery shopping and its relative lack of e-commerce penetration has made groceries a prime (pun intended) target for Amazon, China’s Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and other new economy giants.So far, Amazon’s serious foray into groceries is marked by head-scratching tactics and middling financial and strategic performance. It’s still early in the supermarket era for Amazon, and it’s never wise to count the company out. Still, unlike Amazon’s history of wild experiments that became wild successes, the company doesn’t have the field of grocery innovation entirely to itself. And it remains unclear whether Amazon has a novel or sensible idea to take grocery shopping in a fresh direction. For now, Amazon has a growing grocery sprawl. Customers can buy groceries and household goods from Amazon in a tangle of spots: its eponymous website; Prime Pantry, a separate shopping club for bulky household goods; the 12-year-old Amazon Fresh grocery delivery service that is expanding; Whole Foods and its separate and expanding delivery operation; the Prime Now delivery service for orders in some cities in one or two hours; Amazon’s couple dozen Go convenience stores without cashiers; a different supermarket chain that Amazon is starting from scratch; a couple of drive-in grocery pickup kiosks in the Seattle area; and — if you’re not exhausted yet reading this list— Bloomberg News reported Wednesday that Amazon wants to take the cashier-less Go technology into larger, supermarket-sized stores.There may be a method to Amazon’s grocery madness. For now, it just looks like madness.The company’s most established grocery operation, Fresh, has languished for years. Amazon has made sensible changes at the 500-store Whole Foods chain, but there have been few of the earth-shattering retail innovations that people expected or feared at the time of that acquisition. And Amazon, which has had patchy success with online shopping outside the U.S., has a largely parochial supermarket operation.Investors barely press Amazon to explain its performance and strategy with Whole Foods and its other food initiatives, and Amazon has obliged by not saying much. Amazon’s limited financial disclosures are enough to make me wonder whether groceries sales at U.S. market leader Walmart are growing faster than those at Amazon’s relatively pipsqueak operation.Amazon’s reported third-quarter revenue growth for its physical stores, which include Whole Foods, Go stores and Amazon’s collection of bookstores — declined 1% from a year earlier after adjustments for movements in foreign currencies. This growth figure excludes Whole Foods delivery orders or purchases made for pickup in stores — fast-growing categories of grocery spending.Amazon in previous quarters provided adjusted figures that indicated its physical stores’ revenue growth was closer to 5% to 6% including online and pickup orders. Walmart in the third quarter said its U.S. grocery operation recorded a “mid-single-digit” percentage comparable sales growth — roughly the same range, you’ll notice, as Amazon’s earlier growth figures.The strategic and financial costs for Amazon’s grocery initiatives are enormous. Whole Foods was by far Amazon’s largest acquisition in its history. My Bloomberg News colleagues previously reported that Amazon has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on Go stores, and that may be a lowball figure. In Wednesday’s article, Bloomberg reported that some of the 1,000 or so people working on Go were recently told their cumulative salaries have totaled more than $1 billion since the project started in 2012.A larger, suburban-sized grocery store is what Amazon originally imagined for its cashier-less Go stores before deciding that megamarkets were overly ambitious. The smaller-format Go stores certainly have received much attention — and they are the genuinely novel idea that Amazon hasn’t showed in its other physical store attempts. Still, it’s hard to call the Go stores a success so far, and Amazon has been less ambitious with their rollout than it planned initially.The sophisticated technology behind shopping with as little human interaction as possible is a promising idea, and it could be licensed to non-Amazon supermarkets or other retail stores, as Amazon, Microsoft Corp. and other technology companies are trying. I do wonder whether retailers that compete with Amazon — essentially all retailers these days — will be willing to pay to use technology from a competitor. Those fears, and the response by technology companies and grocers to Amazon’s push into food sales, are among the signs that Amazon may have less time to tinker than it did in the past. It’s the company that everyone else watches closely, to immediately imitate or respond to what it is doing. Amazon has a long leash from investors to figure out tactics that will give the company a crack at an enormous chunk of people’s wallets. The experience of shopping for groceries definitely could use fresh ideas and approaches. I’m just not convinced that Amazon has them.To contact the author of this story: Shira Ovide at sovide@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: Daniel Niemi at dniemi1@bloomberg.netThis column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Shira Ovide is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. She previously was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
- Zacks
Forget Dividend Growth Slowdown With These ETFs
In the third quarter, global dividends hit a record, but the annual growth has decelerated sharply, signaling that "a marked slowdown is under way."
- Zacks
Rockwell Automation & Accenture to Offer Digital Solutions
Rockwell Automation's (ROK) latest partnership with Accenture to assist clients in leveraging Industrial Internet of Things and provide customers with a single digital solutions provider.
- Zacks
Amazon Expands Deal With Salesforce, Gains Competitive Edge
AWS, Amazon's (AMZN) robust cloud platform, extends global partnership with Salesforce.com in a bid to further bolster its cloud offerings.
- Zacks
Google Launches Stadia, Bolsters Initiatives in Gaming Space
Alphabet's (GOOGL) Google is likely to intensify competition in the game space with the launch of Stadia.
- Zacks
3 Reasons Momentum Stock Investors Will Love Microsoft (MSFT)
Microsoft (MSFT) stock is looking quite impressive for momentum-oriented investors as it has favorable price performance and is also seeing positive estimate revisions.
- Zacks
Vodafone to Shift Data Processing & Storage to Google Cloud
The deal is likely to facilitate the digital transformation of Vodafone (VOD) and enhance its service capabilities for superior customer experience.
- Zacks
5 Corporate Giants That Popped After Latest Earnings Release
A few corporate behemoths that reported their last earnings results less than five weeks ago, popped after releasing earnings results.
- Bloomberg
What Bill Gates Gets Wrong About Fossil Fuels
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Investors are turning their back on fossil fuels.Sweden’s central bank sold its holdings of sovereign debt issued by Canadian and Australian local governments dependent on fossil fuel extraction, the Riksbank said last week. A day later, the European Investment Bank said it would stop providing funding for conventional fossil fuels by 2022.One response might be to yawn. Divestment has “reduced about zero tonnes of emissions. It’s not like you’ve capital-starved people making steel and gasoline,” Microsoft founder Bill Gates told the Financial Times in September.That view seems to be grounded in solid academic research: One influential 1996 study of the divestment campaign against the shares of companies involved in apartheid South Africa found the moves had “little discernible effect.” Why should the current hue and cry against carbon-intensive fuels be any different?The argument that shareholder divestment campaigns don’t have a significant direct impact is probably right. Equity markets wouldn’t function without a diverse range of contrarian types with a high appetite for risk. To such investors, a major institution selling out of a cash-generative business like tobacco looks like an opportunity to buy at a discount. It’s a different matter on the debt side, however. Indeed, there’s ample evidence that, contrary to Gates’s view, capital starvation is already rampant.“Coal power plant financing is very challenging,” Dharma Djojonegoro, deputy chief executive officer of Indonesian generator PT Adaro Power, told Reuters in June. “In South Africa, out of the four biggest banks, three have stated that they won’t be funding us,” the former chief executive of generator Eskom Holdings SOC Ltd., Phakamani Hadebe, told a conference the previous month. The withdrawal of coal finance was raising the cost of funding, the chief executive of Polish generator Enea SA told shareholders in May. Adani Enterprises Ltd. has promised to self-fund a controversial Australian coal mine after local banks refused to stump up the cash.Why should things be so different when it comes to debt?The equity market is kept alive by a large array of investors who like nothing better than to make a quick return by challenging the conventional wisdom, and don’t mind racking up a few losses as long as their better trades leave them ahead at the end of the quarter. Most debt investors are different — risk-averse, fearful of downsides, and more likely to follow the herd.For the syndicated loans that most companies use to fund their day-to-day operations, it’s rare to have more than a dozen banks on the ticket. Bonds are a bit more diverse, especially at the high-yield end — but more cautious players such as insurers and pension funds still have the largest chunk of the U.S. corporate fixed-income market.In this more circumspect corner of the capital markets, even investors who don’t have a problem with fossil-fuel finance may wind up backing out for fear of being left stranded by the retreat of other players, according to Fitch Ratings Inc.“As the pool of investors willing to lend to coal projects diminishes,” the cost of debt issuance and refinancing rates could be affected “over concerns that other lenders will not be forthcoming,” the credit company’s macro research affiliate wrote in a May report.Energy is already the highest-risk end of the bond market, with option-adjusted spreads — a measure of the extra return demanded by lenders over the government bond rate — well above other sectors.Even the debt binge that drove sovereign yields below zero across Europe this year has failed to set the market alight. Issuance of non-yuan debt by upstream and integrated oil and gas companies and coal producers is running 15% below its 2017 peak year-to-date, compared to a 32% increase in overall corporate bond issuance, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. As a share of total corporate issuance, the fossil-fuel extraction sector is running at its lowest levels since 2005, the data show.(2)Gates’s history makes him peculiarly ill-suited to understand how damaging debt divestment can be. Microsoft Corp. funded its growth from earnings rather than loans, and has held net cash in every fiscal year since 1990, in part because software is about the most capital-light industry that’s ever been invented. Over the past decade, a dollar of fixed assets has been sufficient to produce $15.23 of revenue at the median software company, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. One common factor of most sin stocks is that they’re also relatively capital-light. Tobacco companies generate $3.68 of revenue for each dollar of fixed assets, and even aerospace and defense companies achieve $4.45, according to Bloomberg’s data. Resource extraction couldn’t be more different: Over the same period, a dollar has produced just 63 cents of revenue for coal, oil and gas.(1) That makes these companies unusually vulnerable to changes in the appetites of lenders.At present, more than 100 financial institutions have put restrictions on their funding for thermal coal, and 41 insurers have divested from or restricted their coverage of the sector.The little coal financing activity that’s still going on is largely dependent on government support from China, Japan and South Korea. State investors already account for 77% of coal power finance in Asia, and it’s increasingly likely that withdrawal of more investors could result in a “domino effect within the industry,” according to Fitch.Don’t underestimate how quickly that could change things. Finance is the lifeblood of business. Cut off its flow, and the heart won’t keep beating for long.(1) We've excluded yuan-denominated debt because so much of the sector is dominated by state-owned lenders.(2) We've based our calculation on property, plant and equipment net of depreciation.To contact the author of this story: David Fickling at dfickling@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: Matthew Brooker at mbrooker1@bloomberg.netThis column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.David Fickling is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering commodities, as well as industrial and consumer companies. He has been a reporter for Bloomberg News, Dow Jones, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and the Guardian.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
- Investing.com
StockBeat – Slack Slumps as Competition From Microsoft Heats Up
Investing.com – Shares of messaging platform Slack Technologies (NYSE:WORK) slumped on Tuesday on competition fears as a rival service from Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) appears to be gaining momentum following a surge in active users.
- Investing.com
Stocks: Home Depot, Kohls, Energy Shares Weigh on Market
Investing.com – Stocks struggled to keep the big rally moving Tuesday, but weakness in retail stocks pulled the Dow lower and kept the S&P; 500 in check.
