Autor: Jane Austen

Meta (META) reported fourth quarter earnings Wednesday that beat expectations while the company forecasted a slowdown in revenue growth in the current quarter and said expenses in 2025 would grow faster than last year. Shares of the company rose roughly 2% in pre-market trading on Thursday, reversing initial losses following the release of the results. The social media giant reported fourth quarter earnings per share of $8.02 on revenue of $48.4 billion, higher than expectations for EPS to reach $6.75 on revenue of $46.9 billion, according to Bloomberg estimates. For the full year, the company’s net income totaled $62.4 billion,…

Efforts to explain the universe’s anomalies continue to focus on dark matter, a mysterious form of matter believed to account for most of the universe’s mass. This invisible entity influences galaxy movements and cosmic structures far more than visible matter. While researchers have long explored potential mass ranges for dark matter, a new study reveals that excessively heavy dark matter could challenge established physical models, particularly the Standard Model of particle physics.Findings from the Study on Dark Matter’s Mass LimitationsAccording to a paper published on the preprint platform arXiv, the mass of dark matter particles might face significant restrictions due…

By Leika Kihara TOKYO (Reuters) – The fading shadow of reflationists in the Bank of Japan, and the latest addition to the board of an academic favouring an end to ultra-low interest rates, will likely bring the central bank’s thinking closer to global peers taking a more conventional approach on monetary policy. Newcomer Junko Koeda, a 49-year-old academic known as a fiscal and monetary hawk, is likely to reinforce the shift towards higher interest rates and bring fresh thinking into a central bank long focused on reflating growth via huge stimulus. As the BOJ eyes further rate hikes, academic-turned Governor…

Cheng Xin / Getty Images Apple stock has surged roughly 40% over the past nine months, with a majority of analysts issuing a «buy» or equivalent rating. However, Oppenheimer analysts downgraded the company Wednesday, cutting its iPhone sales estimate over the next 12 to 18 months. Apple is facing greater competition in China, and its Apple Intelligence rollout has underwhelmed, Oppenheimer said. Shares of Apple (AAPL) have surged roughly 40% over the past nine months, but one analyst said it’s time to tap the brakes ahead of the company’s earnings report scheduled for Thursday. Ten of the 16 analysts who…

CoinDCX has announced a new crypto literacy project in Mumbai, that will attempt to kickstart discussions on crypto and digital assets at a popular meeting place in the city — tea stalls. Dubbed ‘Bitcoin Chai Cafe’, the Indian crypto exchange’s latest initiative is designed to promote crypto-related conversations at tea stalls, which are frequented by office goers, students, and others from varied age groups. The firm is looking to expand crypto awareness beyond the usual Web3 circles to mainstream financial communities and students.The crypto firm says it will introduce ‘chai cafés’ on wheels into financial hotspots and tech parks across…

This year, three public squares in Rome are getting pedestrian-friendly revamps. With fresh plantings of bushes and shade trees, water-permeable surfaces and reduced space for motor vehicles, the Piazza dei Cinquecento, Piazza del Risorgimento and Piazza Giovanni in Laterano are all reopening — or have just reopened — as cleaner, greener spaces. These follow close on the heels of the December inauguration of an €85 million ($88.6 million) pedestrianization project in Piazza Pia; there, several lanes of traffic abutting the River Tiber were buried in an underpass to make room for walkers.Such infrastructure upgrades are not uncommon in Europe nowadays,…

Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto via Getty Images Meta will release its fourth-quarter earnings after the closing bell on Wednesday. Shares in the tech giant were up 15% year-to-date through Tuesday. Investors are on high alert for key details on AI monetization. Meta will report fourth-quarter earnings on Wednesday after the closing bell. Investors will be watching for key details on AI monetization. They’ll also be looking for any commentary around the sudden rise of DeepSeek, whose AI models roiled the tech industry this week, wiping out more than $1 trillion of market value. Meta’s earnings-release time is shortly after 4 p.m. ET,…

C.H. Robinson’s fourth quarter earnings were mostly positive. (Photo: C.H. Robinson) With comparisons on a year-to-year basis for C.H. Robinson having been strong for several quarters, investors had turned to sequential comparisons to see how the overhaul of the giant 3PL was progressing under CEO David Bozeman, who has been in his role since June 2023. The latest quarterly earnings of C.H. Robinson released Wednesday showed some slowdown using the comparison to the third quarter as a guide. But there were also gains. Profitability comparisons to a year earlier were extremely strong. For example, gross profits in the fourth quarter…

Chinese tech company Alibaba on Wednesday released a new version of its Qwen 2.5 Artificial Intelligence (AI) model that it claimed surpassed the highly-acclaimed DeepSeek-V3.The unusual timing of the Qwen 2.5-Max’s release, on the first day of the Lunar New Year when most Chinese people are off work and with their families, points to the pressure Chinese AI startup DeepSeek’s meteoric rise in the past three weeks has placed on not just overseas rivals, but also its domestic competition.»Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms … almost across the board GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3 and Llama-3.1-405B,» Alibaba’s cloud unit said in an announcement posted on its…

(Bloomberg) — European and US stock futures gained in line with Asian shares as traders looked ahead to a rate decision by the European Central Bank. Most Read from Bloomberg Euro Stoxx 50 and S&P 500 contracts advanced 0.3% each. The moves echoed a small bump in Asian share prices, which pushed a regional gauge around 0.2% higher. But liquidity was thin in region, with many of the biggest stock markets closed for the Lunar New Year holiday. Investors had plenty to digest from US trading hours — but none of it pointed to a clear direction for stocks. A…