Stocks in focus: CVS, Walgreens, Coupa Software, Microsoft

Yahoo Finance's Jared Blikre highlights which stocks and sectors to watch at the closing bell.

Video transcript

JARED BLIKRE: All right, let's take a look at some of the stocks moving ahead of the close. And we're leading with some news involving CVS and Walgreens. Both are up a little bit less than 2%. I'm going to put a one-year chart as I read you the news here.

They've settled with various state attorneys general for $10.7 billion over their roles in the opioid crisis, of which CVS will pay $5 billion over 10 years, and Walgreens will pay $5.7 billion over 15 years. Both pharmacies agreed a court ordered relief requiring them to monitor, report, and share data about suspicious activity related to opioid prescriptions.

And now moving along to the software space, I'm going to bring that up here. One of the little-- smaller names I should point out is Coupa Software. They are up 26% today. And that little dot right there is where they are in relation to their one-year chart. And this is fueling Coupa Software's rise to the top of Yahoo Finance's charts, trending tickers today.

The accounting software company handily beat on both its top and bottom lines, but the big story is that the company may not be preparing too many more 10-Qs if the Thoma Bravo private bid for the company to the tune of $6.2 billion goes through as planned in the first half of 2022.

Of the private equity deal to be paid in cash, Citigroup is saying, Coupa Brands-- a deliberate process with both strategic and financial parties before agreeing to the offer, suggesting limited risk of another betting offer coming in later. Also, Citigroup adding, $81 per share, that takeout may be lower than some shareholders wanted.

And now to another partnership, this one involving the exchange space and a familiar name, Microsoft, one of our giant trending tickers here. And let me just put this in, and also, the London Stock Exchange. Now we don't talk about the LSE too much, but the news today is they may be giving into a Bloomberg competitor. It may be giving up some of those rights. A terminal run-- now that's kind of a pun on the Bloomberg business line. You can see London Stock Exchange, that is up 13% year over year.

Now, the exchange is selling a 4% stake to Microsoft, valued at $2 billion, and it will be licensing its data in the platform capabilities to the tech giant. These include those from the LSC's $27 billion purchase of Refinitiv last year. Microsoft will be weaving the data into its 365 and Team software, and it expects the deal to generate $5 billion over the next 10 years.

So, Seana, not a lot of news, or I guess, second day news on this today. We kind of got the story overnight there. But I will say it's kind of a big deal. You think about Bloomberg competitors. Maybe Microsoft and Refinitiv, through the London Stock Exchange, have the ante here.

SEANA SMITH: Yeah, you know what's also interesting, just from a regulatory perspective as well, right, kind of this blurring line between big tech and banks and exchanges in this case. And it's not something that we haven't seen before because last year, Google [INAUDIBLE] had a partnership, they reached a partnership. And NASDAQ and Amazon reached a partnership.

But from a regulatory perspective, I would think that a deal like this would likely be scrutinized, given the fact that now we're seeing kind of those boundaries being blurred just a bit.

JARED BLIKRE: We'll have to see. We know big tech has been in the forefront here, especially in antitrust regulators' headlights here. But I don't know that exchange data, especially through this Refinitiv purchase when Microsoft really doesn't have a direct line of business into that kind of line of business. I don't know if the regulators are going to get involved, but they're always up Microsoft [INAUDIBLE].

SEANA SMITH: Yeah, or the fact that they're relying on just only a few cloud providers out there, but it's going to be interesting. But certainly a deal to note today. All right--