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Dow drops more than 350 points as Wall Street's rally takes a breather: Live updates

Aseem — Mon, 21 Oct 2024 19:32:50 +0000

A trader works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

NYSE

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell Monday, giving back some of the strong gains from last week, as Treasury yields rose and investors awaited new earnings reports.

The S&P 500 slipped 0.3%, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 330 points, or about 0.8%. The Nasdaq Composite hovered just above the flatline.

Consumer and homebuilder stocks were among the biggest losers as fears about higher-for-longer interest rates crept up, with Target and Builders FirstSource each down more than 4%. Lennar also shed more than 3.5%.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury jumped, rising more than 10 basis points to 4.178%.

“Bond yields continue to back up, which implies to me that investors are now thinking that the Fed will be slower to lower interest rates because the economy remains resilient,” CFRA chief investment strategist Sam Stovall said. “As a result, the Fed will likely have a harder time pushing the inflation rate down to its target 2% level in the next year or so.”

Earnings will be key this week with roughly one-fifth of the S&P 500 set to report. Among the companies on deck are Tesla, Coca-Cola and GE Aerospace.

Thus far, the results have been mixed. Of the 14% of S&P 500 companies that have already posted third-quarter results, 79% have beaten expectations, according to FactSet’s John Butters. Analysts have significantly downgraded their earnings expectations for the quarter in recent months.

“I don’t think that we are in the beginnings of an earnings recession or anything like that, but the bar has been set very, very low … rarely does anybody injure themselves falling out of a basement window,” Stovall said. “So with earnings this low, chances are that this will be the 60th quarter out of the past 62 in which actual results exceed end-of-quarter estimates.”

Still, investors are largely optimistic equities still have further room to run, but they are mindful that stretched valuations, particularly ahead of the U.S. presidential election and amid rising geopolitical risks, could also mean further choppiness.

Monday’s moves come after both the S&P 500 and 30-stock Dow registered all-time highs on Friday, cementing a sixth straight weekly advance for both benchmarks.

The Oura Ring 4 is sleek and easy to wear but scratches easily. Here's what it's like

Harsh — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 10:00:01 +0000

The Oura Ring 4.

Courtesy: Oura

After two weeks of wearing the Oura Ring 4, the smart ring gave me a better understanding of how my sleep, stress and exercise influence how I feel in my day-to-day life.

The Oura Ring 4 began shipping to customers and became available in retail stores on Tuesday, and it’s an impressive option for those looking for a sleek and comfortable way to learn more about their bodies and make healthier choices.

The smart ring offers more accurate sensors, a more comfortable design and longer battery life than its predecessor. The gadget is available in 12 sizes and six colors, including a new black finish, and it costs $349, although users have to pay a $5.99 a month, or $69.99 a year, subscription to use all of the accompanying app’s features.

On the whole, the Oura Ring 4 is comfortable to wear and its app is easy to navigate. The ring was a bit more clunky and scratched more easily than I’d prefer, but after two weeks of testing it, the Oura Ring 4 did provide me useful information about my health.

Getting set up

Ashley Capoot wearing the Oura Ring 4.

Ashley Capoot

I had never worn an Oura Ring before, so the entire experience was new to me.

The first order of business was choosing a color and determining my ring size, which I did by using the company’s sizing kit. Oura recommends customers new and old should get sized since the fit can change from one generation to the next. The kits are available online, and in-store sizing is available at retailers such as Target and Best Buy, the company said.

Silver jewelry has always been my preferred style, so I picked the silver Oura Ring 4 to match my accessories.

Getting sized proved more difficult. I did my sizing in person with the Oura team, but I misjudged it slightly. The ring I’ve been wearing is a little big, so there are sometimes gaps between my finger and the hardware. I never felt like my ring was going to fall off, but I would size down if I were to do it again.

The ring was delivered to my apartment in a small box that included a charger and some basic instructions about how to clean and wear it.

I charged the ring as I downloaded the Oura app and filled it out with biographical information such as my birthday, height and weight. Pairing the hoop with my iPhone was incredibly easy, and once the battery was topped off, it was time to slip the ring on.

What’s good

The redesigned Oura app.

Courtesy: Oura

As someone who has never liked the look of smartwatches, I was excited to try out the Oura Ring 4 and use it to track my sleep. The wearable was so comfortable, I often forgot I had it on.

That’s at least in part due to the device’s new sensors, which are significantly smaller than those of its predecessor. The third-generation Oura has sensors that are raised and feel like little bumps, while those on the Ring 4 are basically flat, giving it a smooth interior like any other ring.

I purposely wore the ring on my right index finger. I still write a lot of my stories by hand (old school, I know), so I wanted to see if it would bother me while holding a pen or pencil. It didn’t. The ring is also designed to be worn 24/7 and is water resistant, and it didn’t give me any trouble when I washed my hands or showered with it.

Another highlight was the Oura app. The company began rolling out a redesign of the app to all its users earlier this month, and I thought the layout of the app was very intuitive. Data from the smart rings is presented in three tabs called Today, Vitals and My Health.

The Today tab highlights information based on the time of day, and it includes shortcuts where I could quickly view the latest readings for things such as my sleep, activity, heart rate, stress or my readiness for the day. These at-a-glance metrics are easy to digest and helpful to look at when I had a quick minute throughout the day.

I also enjoyed looking at my reading at a more granular level in the Vitals tab. There’s a lot to learn and decipher. Oura shows you nearly 20 different data points about your sleep alone. Even so, the company does a nice job breaking down all of these concepts in simple language. I wasn’t familiar with the term latency, for example, but the app taught me that it’s the amount of time it takes to fall asleep.

The My Health tab gives users access to longer-term insights such as heart health, sleep health and resilience, a metric that measures your ability to recover from stress over time. These metrics are calibrated once Oura has recorded several weeks’ worth of data, so I was unable to explore this feature in depth for this review.

Before the review, I was concerned about whether Oura’s metrics would negatively affect my mood. For instance, if Oura tells me that I slept poorly, would I feel less prepared to take on my day?

I was pleasantly surprised by how the company approached this framing. I never felt like I was being reprimanded for getting a bad night’s sleep, feeling stressed or missing a workout. Instead, Oura gave me tips about small changes I could make to feel better throughout the day, such as taking a few minutes for a break or meditation.

I also liked that the exercise goal in the app varied based on my readings. If there was a day where I was particularly tired or stressed, Oura lowered my activity goal. This helped me feel a sense of accomplishment even when I wasn’t at my very best.

website, Oura says users can prevent scratches by wearing the ring on their nondominant hand, keeping it separated from other rings and taking it off in high-friction scenarios such as weight lifting.

Despite this warning, I was surprised by how quickly the Ring 4 showed signs of wear, especially given its price tag. And no, scratches are not covered by Oura’s warranty policy.

Another let down was the ring’s battery life. It didn’t last as long as Oura said it would.

The company touts eight days of battery life, but I was usually prompted to charge my ring after about five or six days. The company said battery life depends on users’ ring size, feature configuration, app settings, usage and other factors, so it varies from person to person.

Five to six days is still better than an Apple Watch, which usually needs daily charging, but I definitely wasn’t getting the eight days I was expecting.

My last gripe was purely aesthetic. I have small hands, so I thought the Ring 4 looked a little clunky in comparison to the jewelry I normally wear. My friends said they didn’t notice this, but the Ring 4 is not a style I would typically reach for, though admittedly, I’ve gotten more used to it with time.

Should you buy it?

It’s worth noting that getting access to Oura’s full slate of features doesn’t come cheap.

You don’t have to pay for the company’s monthly subscription if you don’t want to, but without it, you’ll only be able to access your daily sleep, readiness and activity scores, according to Oura’s website. I really enjoyed being able to track my stress levels, so for that feature alone, I would get the membership. If you want that kind of information, be prepared to make a monthly $5 commitment before getting hitched to an Oura Ring 4.

Overall, the new Oura smart ring is easy to wear and use, and it’s a great option if you’re looking for a low-maintenance way to track your health. I’ve been recommending it to family and friends, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I do end up purchasing one for myself someday.

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Kamala Harris wants to take on price gouging. It's hard to find agreement on what it even is

suimt — Sun, 29 Sep 2024 12:00:01 +0000

Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, stop at a Sheetz gas station in Coraopolis, Pennsylvania, on Aug. 18, 2024.

Angela Weiss | AFP | Getty Images

As she unveiled her most detailed economic plan yet this week, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris pledged to fight price gouging in order to rein in voters’ grocery costs.

The vice president first teased the federal ban in mid-August, prompting former President Donald Trump to attack the plan as “Soviet-style” price controls. Although Harris released more detail Wednesday as part of her 82-page economic plan, it’s still unclear what price hikes her administration would see as illegal “price gouging.”

“The bill will set rules of the road to make clear that big corporations can’t unfairly exploit consumers during times of crisis to run up excessive corporate profits on food and groceries,” the Harris-Walz campaign wrote in the policy pitch, released about six weeks before Election Day.

Higher prices — and who or what is to blame for them — have become a central theme in the presidential race, as steep grocery bills frustrate Americans and retailers anticipate a holiday season marked by deal-hunting. Harris and Trump have each proposed their own solutions to combat inflation, as Americans continue to pay more for groceries, energy, housing and other everyday expenses.

In the last year, prices for food at home have risen just 1%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But groceries are still 25% more expensive than they were in August 2019, before supply chain snarls and inflation sent prices soaring.

Voters will ultimately weigh in on what role government leaders should play in companies’ pricing. Generally, Republicans support fewer economic regulations, although Trump has suggested limiting food imports as a way to lower grocery prices. Economists have warned that the strategy would likely backfire.

Halting price hikes is a popular idea with voters. Sixty percent of adult U.S. citizens support capping increases on food and grocery prices, according to a poll by The Economist/YouGov conducted from Aug. 25-27.

Still, Harris would face a tough road to passing any price-gouging legislation in Congress, and it’s still not clear how cracking down on price increases would work in practice.

Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, which found that markups contributed “substantially” to inflation.

But many economists — and Fed Chair Jerome Powell — don’t think that corporate profits are to blame for inflation. Instead, they attribute the sharp rise in prices to a variety of other factors, such as the tight labor market and supply chain issues.

And regardless of what the term means, the companies involved have argued they are not to blame for higher grocery prices.

“It’s critical that we get the economic facts right and avoid political rhetoric,” Sarah Gallo, senior vice president of product policy and federal affairs for the Consumer Brands Association, said in a statement in August. “The reality is that there are complex economic factors at play … The industry is supportive of the Federal Trade Commission’s consumer protection mission as well as the Department of Justice’s already established laws that prohibit price gouging and unfair trade practices.”

Some retail leaders, including Target CEO Brian Cornell, have also pushed back against price gouging accusations waged against the industry. In an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” in August, he said retailers lose customers to competitors if they hike prices too high.

Yet Jharonne Martis, director of consumer research at LSEG, said there are some “red flags” catching politicians’ attention. She analyzed gross profit margins for a cross-section of companies, including grocers, consumer packaged goods companies and restaurants during the years before, during and after the Covid pandemic. The metric measures the percentage of net sales that a company makes compared with its costs.

Some of those companies, including Kroger, Procter & Gamble and Domino’s Pizza, have higher gross profit margins than they did prior to the pandemic. She said that can reflect company-specific moves, such as Domino’s selling more pizza or Kroger customers gravitating to its more profitable private label brands.

A customer shops in a Kroger grocery store on July 15, 2022 in Houston, Texas.

Brandon Bell | Getty Images

An antitrust challenge to Kroger’s $24.6 billion acquisition of supermarket chain Albertsons has also increased scrutiny of companies’ pricing practices. The Federal Trade Commission is trying to stop the merger in court, and during the trial, Kroger’s top pricing executive testified that the retailer raised prices on milk and eggs more than required to account for higher costs.

In a company statement, Kroger described accusations of price gouging as “misleading” and said that nearly all costs of running a grocery store, including labor and transportation, have risen significantly since 2020.

“We work relentlessly to keep prices as low as possible for customers in our highly competitive industry,” the statement said.

On the other hand, Arun Sundaram, an equity research analyst at CFRA Research who covers grocers and consumer packaged goods companies, said he sees no evidence of price gouging in the grocery industry. He said price hikes are coming from companies passing on some of their higher production costs to customers.

Higher margins can come from a variety of factors and aren’t necessarily a sign of corporate greed or price gouging, he said. They can rise because companies are operating more efficiently or because the mix of merchandise they sell has changed.

Margins also can reflect the power of a brand and consumers’ willingness to tolerate large markups on fashionable or popular items, such as a unique pair of sneakers or a designer dress.

But Sundaram said there may be some merit to the debate in the meatpacking industry, which has faced some price-fixing lawsuits. For instance, JBS’ Pilgrim’s Pride Corporation, one of the country’s largest chicken producers, pleaded guilty in 2021 to conspiring to fix chicken prices and pass on costs to consumers.

A sign saying “Low price!” hangs from a shelf at a Target store in Miami, Florida, on May 20, 2024.

Joe Raedle | Getty Images

PepsiCo and Campbell Soup have seen their sales volumes shrink as consumers opt for cheaper alternatives or snack less. And as inflation slows, most have raised their prices less — and less frequently.

“You’ve got a shopper who has seen seven or eight [price hikes] in a year, and you know that they’re frustrated with it,” said Steve Zurek, vice president of thought leadership at market research firm NielsenIQ.

Walmart, the nation’s top retailer and grocer by annual revenue, said it’s cracking down on price hikes by vendors that it carries. On an earnings call last month, CEO Doug McMillon said inflation has been stickier in aisles that carry dry groceries and processed foods. He said the big-box retailer is calling on its suppliers to keep prices stable or cut them.

“We have less upward pressure, but there are some that are still talking about cost increases, and we’re fighting back on that aggressively because we think prices need to come down,” he said on the call.

To address consumers’ frustration and slower sales, many food companies are bringing back discounts, according to Zurek.

During the pandemic, many manufacturers stopped offering deals because they were struggling to keep shelves stocked. They didn’t need to boost demand because customers were already loading their pantries and stockpiling hand sanitizer and toilet paper. Supply chain issues exacerbated the problem, and inflation lifted sales without them needing people to buy more items.

That dynamic has now flipped for many companies. And it isn’t just food companies offering deals.

Target cut prices on thousands of items. Walmart has increased short-term deals on certain products, especially in the grocery department. And this week, Party City announced lower prices on more than 2,000 items such as balloons and candy as shoppers gear up for Halloween.

Even so, shoppers are unlikely to see grocery store prices slashed across the board, Zurek said.

“From an economic standpoint, you never want to be talking about deflation — that’s almost as bad as inflation,” he told CNBC.

But there have been a few examples of companies reversing price hikes. Robert Crane, J.M. Smucker’s vice president of sales and sales commercialization, said the food company has passed on “commodity relief” to consumers when possible, such as with its coffee brands, which include Folgers and Cafe Bustelo. In fiscal 2024, Smucker’s profit margins for its coffee division were 28.1%, down from 31.9% in fiscal 2019.

But in early October, Smucker plans to hike its coffee prices for the second time this year, responding to rising commodity prices.

As it justifies those decisions to top retailers, the company brings in professionals who can explain the green coffee commodity market, according to Crane.

“We would review charts, we would talk about outlooks, and we would talk about what’s driving it — is it weather? Is it speculation driven?” Crane said.

But that doesn’t mean stopping or slowing price increases is simple, said CFRA’s Sundaram.

He said a long list of factors led to inflation, including a spike in supply-chain costs, wage increases stemming from labor shortages and poor weather in regions of the world that produce food such as corn, soybeans and cocoa. He’s skeptical that either administration can bring about a quick fix.

“Because it was a complicated set of factors that led to this, it’s going to be a complicated set of factors that probably gets rid of this as well,” he said.

Big-box stores could help slash emissions and save millions by putting solar panels on roofs. Why aren't more of them doing it?

Diksha — Sun, 20 Mar 2022 07:01:50 +0000

CNN
—

As the US attempts to wean itself off its heavy reliance on fossil fuels and shift to cleaner energy sources, many experts are eyeing a promising solution: your neighborhood big-box stores and shopping malls.

The rooftops and parking lot space available at retail giants like Walmart, Target and Costco is massive. And these largely empty spaces are being touted as untapped potential for solar power that could help the US reduce its dependency on foreign energy, slash planet-warming emissions and save companies millions of dollars in the process.

At the IKEA store in Baltimore, installing solar panels on the roof and over the store’s parking lot cut the amount of energy it needed to purchase by 84%, slashing its costs by 57% from September to December of 2020, according to the company. (The panels also provide some beneficial shade to keep customers’ cars cool on hot, sunny days.)

As of February 2021, IKEA had 54 solar arrays installed across 90% of its US locations.

Big-box stores and shopping centers have enough roof space to produce half of their annual electricity needs from solar, according to a report from nonprofit Environment America and research firm Frontier Group.

Leveraging the full rooftop solar potential of these superstores would generate enough electricity to power nearly 8 million average homes, the report concluded, and would cut the same amount of planet-warming emissions as pulling 11.3 million gas-powered cars off the road.

The average Walmart store, for example, has 180,000 square feet of rooftop, according to the report. That’s roughly the size of three football fields and enough space to support solar energy that could power the equivalent of 200 homes, the report said.

“Every rooftop in America that isn’t producing solar energy is a rooftop wasted as we work to break our dependence on fossil fuels and the geopolitical conflicts that come with them,” Johanna Neumann, senior director for Environment America’s campaign for 100% Renewable, told CNN. “Now is the time to lean into local renewable energy production, and there’s no better place than the roofs of America’s big-box superstores.”

Advocates involved in clean energy worker-training programs tell CNN that a solar revolution in big-box retail would also be a significant windfall for local communities, spurring economic growth while tackling the climate crisis, which has inflicted disproportionate harm on marginalized communities.

Yet only a fraction of big-box stores in the US have solar on their rooftops or solar canopies in parking lots, the report’s authors told CNN.

CNN reached out to five of the top US retailers — Walmart, Kroger, Home Depot, Costco and Target — to ask: Why not invest in more rooftop solar?

Many renewable energy experts point to solar as a relatively simple solution to cut down on costs and help rein in fossil fuel emissions, but the companies point to several roadblocks — regulations, labor costs and structural integrity of the rooftops themselves — that are preventing more widespread adoption.

The need for these kinds of clean energy initiatives is becoming “unquestionably urgent” as the climate crisis accelerates, said Edwin Cowen, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Cornell University.

“We are behind the eight ball, to put it mildly,” Cowen told CNN. “I would have loved to see policy help incentivize rooftop solar 15 years ago instead of five years ago in the commercial space. There’s still a tremendous amount of work to do.”

Neumann said Walmart, the nation’s largest retailer, possesses by far the largest solar potential. Walmart has around 5,000 stores in the US and more than 783 million square feet of rooftop space — an area larger than Manhattan — and more than 8,974 gigawatt hours of annual rooftop solar potential, according to the report.

It’s enough electricity to power more than 842,000 homes, the report said.

Walmart spokesperson Mariel Messier told CNN the company is involved in renewable energy projects around the world, but many of them are not rooftop solar installations. The company has reported having completed on- and off-site wind and solar projects or had others under development with a capacity to produce more than 2.3 gigawatts of renewable energy.

Neumann said Environment America has met with Walmart a few times, urging the retailer to commit to installing solar panels on roofs and in parking lots. The company has said it’s aiming to source 100% of its energy through renewable projects by 2035.

“Of all the retailers in America, Walmart stands to make the biggest impact if they put rooftop solar on all of their stores,” Neumann told CNN. “And for us, this report just underscores just how much of an impact they could make if they make that decision.”

According to Environment America, Walmart had installed almost 194 megawatts of solar capacity on its US facilities as of the end of the 2021 fiscal year and additional capacity in off-site solar farms. The company’s installations in California were expected to provide between 20% to 30% of each location’s electricity needs.

Target ranked No. 1 for on-site solar capacity in 2019, according to industry trade group Solar Energy Industries Association’s most recent report. It currently has 542 locations with rooftop solar — around a quarter of the company’s stores — a Target spokesperson told CNN. Rooftop solar generates enough energy to meet 15% to 40% of Target properties’ energy needs, the spokesperson said.

Richard Galanti, the chief financial officer at Costco, said the company has 121 stores with rooftop solar around the world, 95 of which are in the US.

Walmart, Target and Costco did not share with CNN what their biggest barriers are to adding rooftop or parking lot solar panels to more stores.

Approximate number of households companies could power with rooftop solar

Source: Environment America, Frontier Group report, “Solar on Superstores”

“My suspicion is that they want an even stronger business case for deviating from business-as-usual,” Neumann said. “Historically, all those roofs have done is cover their stores, and rethinking how [they] use their buildings and thinking of them as energy generators, not just protection from rain, requires a small change in their business model.”

Home Depot, which has around 2,300 stores, currently has 75 completed rooftop solar projects, 12 in construction and more than 30 planned for future development, said Craig D’Arcy, the company’s director of energy management. Solar power generates around half of these stores’ energy needs on average, he said.

Aging rooftops at stores are a “huge impediment” to solar installation, D’Arcy added. If a roof needs to be replaced in the next 15 to 20 years or sooner, it doesn’t make financial sense for Home Depot to add solar systems today, he said.

“We have a goal of implementing solar rooftop where the economics are attractive,” D’Arcy told CNN.

CNN also reached out to Kroger, which owns about 2,800 stores across the US. Kristal Howard, a Kroger spokesperson, said the company currently has 15 properties — stores, distribution centers and manufacturing plants — with solar installations. One of the “multiple factors affecting the viability of a solar installation” was the stores’ ability to support a solar installation on the roofs, Howard said.

Cowen, the engineering professor at Cornell, said solar is already attractive, but that labor costs, incentives and the different layers of regulation likely pose some financial challenges in solar installations.

“For them, this means usually hiring a local site firm that can do that installation that also knows local policy,” Cowen said. “It’s just another layer of complexity that I think is beginning to make sense because the costs have come down enough, but it needs kind of reopening that door of getting into an existing building.”

Rep. Sean Casten of Illinois, who co-chairs the power sector task force in the House, said the US has “failed to provide the incentives to people who have the expertise to go in and build these things.” The reason both retail companies and the power sector have not made much progress on solar is because “our system is so disjointed” and has a complex regulation structure, Casten said.

“Why aren’t we doing something that makes economic sense? The answer is this horribly disjointed federal policy where we massively subsidize fossil energy extraction, and we penalize clean energy production,” Casten told CNN. “For a long, long time, if you wanted to build a solar panel on the rooftop of Walmart, your biggest enemy was going to be your local utility because they didn’t want to lose the load.

“We could have done this decades ago,” Casten added. “And had we done it, we would not be in this dire position with the climate, but we’d also have a lot more money in our pocket.”

For Charles Callaway, director of organizing at the nonprofit group WE ACT for Environmental Justice, strengthening the rooftop solar capacity in big box retail stores is a no-brainer, especially if companies allow the local community to reap benefits either through installation jobs or sharing the electricity produced later.

Either way, it would put a massive dent in curbing the climate crisis and help usher in an equitable transition away from fossil fuels — and it’s doable, Callaway told CNN.

The New York City resident led a worker training program that helped train more than 100 local community members, mostly people of color, to become solar installers. He also formed a solar workers cooperative to ensure many of the participants of the training program get jobs in a tough market.

In the last two years, Callaway said his group has not only installed solar panels on roofs of affordable housing units, but also equipment capable of producing 2 megawatts of solar energy on shopping malls up in upstate New York. He emphasized that hiring locally would be most beneficial since local installers know the community and local regulations best.

“One of my huge concerns is social equity,” Cowen said. “Access to renewable energy is a fairly privileged position these days, and we’ve got to figure out ways to make that not true.”

Jasmine Graham, WE ACT’s energy justice policy manager, said the potential of building rooftop solar on big box superstores is encouraging, only “if these projects use local labor, if they are paying prevailing wages, and if this solar is being used in a manner such as community solar, which would allow [utility] bill discounts for folks that live in the same utility zone.”

Pressure is mounting for global leaders to act urgently on the climate crisis after a UN report in late February warned the window for action is rapidly closing.

Neumann believes the US can meet its energy demand with renewables. All it takes, she said, is the political will to make that switch, and the inclusion of the local community so no one gets left behind in the transition.

“The sooner we make that transition, the sooner we’ll have cleaner air, the sooner we’ll have a more protected environment and better health and the sooner we’ll have a more livable future for our kids,” Neumann said. “And even if that requires investment, it is an investment worth making.”