U.S. stocks jumped on Monday as more merger and acquisition activity in the last days of the third quarter encouraged investors following three sessions of losses.

Xerox Corp will buy Affiliated Computer Services Inc for $6.4 billion in a cash-and-stock deal that expands the copier company into technology outsourcing and data management.

Xerox shares fell 13.4 percent to $7.77 while ACS shot up 16.7 percent to $55.06.

Abbott Laboratories said it would buy the drugs unit of Solvay in a $6.6 billion deal, giving Abbott full control of its Belgian development partner’s cholesterol treatments and exposure to emerging markets.

Abbott stock rose 3.7 percent to $49.11.

“Deal announcements are helping the market off to a good start, especially as we had a bit of selling off last week,” said Peter Jankovskis, co-chief investment officer at OakBrook Investments LLC in Lisle, Illinois.

“People were waiting for a time to get in, and now, they have it.”

With Monday’s gains, the Dow Jones

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By now we’ve all heard of Amazon’s near-billion dollar acquisition of Zappos which provided a tremendous return to Zappos’ original investors – Sequoia Capital and Venture Frogs. In fact, they only invested $60 million in the company over seven rounds. And, now, they’re sitting on a billion dollar return. How’s that for IRR?

Obviously, this is the magic of venture capital and outside of investing in a publicly traded venture BDC like Harris and Harris (Ticker: TINY), there’s not much we at home investors can do to get in on the ground floor. But, with up and coming retailers, we can still win! Heck, everyone remembers when Zappos was a low-price retailer instead of just a “customer service focused” retailer. Those were good days weren’t they?

Well, it seems a new trend is hitting the web. “Private” members-only luxury sample sale sites.  These retailers focus on getting limited quantities of

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Forget Microsoft-Apple or Microsoft-Google. A new rivalry is developing in the tech world. Google and Apple are increasingly squaring off over lucrative markets like the mobile computing field.

The rivalry between the two companies is occurring on a worldwide battlefield. And now this budding Apple-Google rivalry has spread to perhaps the most important mobile phone market in the world – China. China is the world’s largest mobile phone market with 700 million subscribers.

However, China has only recently launched third generation services, which offer broadband-speed data connections. Smart phone penetration in China is running at 10 percent of all handsets sold. But the smart phones are expected to generate higher revenues as subscribers access features such as music, multimedia and games downloads.

China Mobile will fire the opening shot in the battle for high-value subscribers over the next couple of months with the launch of the 3G OPhone, which

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A few days ago I wrote that the last time the US Mint suspended gold sales that the retail price of gold shot up#8230;it appears this may be happening again: American Eagle 1/10 Oz, is selling for a 28.0% premium over spot, and an implied 1,217.91 / oz Krugerrand 1/10 Oz, is selling for a 25.4% premium [...]div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/YourFinancialFuture?a=0Rj_2ehpJj8:Qprlg7lreJs:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/YourFinancialFuture?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/YourFinancialFuture?a=0Rj_2ehpJj8:Qprlg7lreJs:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/YourFinancialFuture?i=0Rj_2ehpJj8:Qprlg7lreJs:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/YourFinancialFuture?a=0Rj_2ehpJj8:Qprlg7lreJs:7Q72WNTAKBA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/YourFinancialFuture?d=7Q72WNTAKBA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/YourFinancialFuture?a=0Rj_2ehpJj8:Qprlg7lreJs:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/YourFinancialFuture?i=0Rj_2ehpJj8:Qprlg7lreJs:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/YourFinancialFuture?a=0Rj_2ehpJj8:Qprlg7lreJs:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/YourFinancialFuture?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/YourFinancialFuture?a=0Rj_2ehpJj8:Qprlg7lreJs:l6gmwiTKsz0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/YourFinancialFuture?d=l6gmwiTKsz0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/YourFinancialFuture?a=0Rj_2ehpJj8:Qprlg7lreJs:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/YourFinancialFuture?i=0Rj_2ehpJj8:Qprlg7lreJs:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a /div

Celsius Holdings, Inc., the marketer of Celsius®, the original, great tasting calorie burner that is backed by science, recently announced that Celsius® will soon be available at participating 7-Eleven stores in mid-August. 7-Eleven is the world’s leader in convenience retailing and operates and franchises more than 5,750 stores throughout the United States.

Celsius is scientifically proven to burn up to 100 calories or more per can by raising metabolism and generating increased energy and alertness. Under the terms of this agreement, 7-Eleven stores will add three Celsius flavors to its product line that cater to a trend towards healthier, functional beverages. 7-Eleven expects to carry Sparkling Orange, Green Tea Raspberry Acai and Green Tea Peach Mango at participating stores.

Janice Haley, co-founder of Celsius, commented, “7-Eleven represents a significant milestone for Celsius in that it adds distribution with a leader in the convenience channel, increasing the consumers’ access beyond existing channels

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The U.S. housing market continued its tepid trek toward recovery as housing starts in May exceeded expectations, the U.S. Commerce Department said yesterday (Tuesday).

Housing starts soared 17.2% from April to May, nearly double the 7% increase economists were projecting, Actual housing starts reached a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 532,000, also well ahead of the 490,000 economists surveyed by the Dow Jones Newswires had projected, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Despite the unexpected month-to-month uptick, U.S. housing starts are still more than 45% below the pace of a year ago when the housing-start rate was 971,000.

And just because there’s been an increase in home construction doesn’t mean there’s been an accompanying increase in housing demand, Andrew Waite, a former institutional investor who is now the publisher ofPersonal Real Estate Investor magazine, told Money Morning in a telephone interview.

In fact, says Steve Hagenbuckle, managing principal of real estate private

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The following two charts (and the comments in between them) are part of a very interesting article by James Hamilton. The collapse in oil prices last fall acted as a key economic stabilizer and helped ameliorate the economic decline. It showed up in two key places. The first was in the trade deficit numbers, which have shown a very dramatic improvement over the last year (see here and here). The other place it showed up was in retail sales, since a dollar spent at the gas pump is a dollar that can not be spent elsewhere. Since last Christmas, prices at the pump have climbed sharply, as shown in the first graph. While prices are still far below the levels of a year ago, the current levels are high enough to start hurting, especially those who have seen their incomes drop due to the ...

Often after a sharp economic downturn we observe an equally dramatic recovery. But nobody can claim to be seeing that so far in the currently available data.

Since the beginning of April, we've been discussing one potentially favorable indicator in the form of new claims for unemployment insurance. In each of the last 6 recessions, the 4-week average of this series reached a peak less than 8 weeks before the economic recovery began. None of the readings over the last 8 weeks exceeded the value reached April 9, consistent with the hypothesis that we are past the peak in new claims for this cycle.

Black line: 4-week average of seasonally adjusted weekly initial claims for unemployment insurance, from Department of Labor via Webstract. Shaded areas correspond to recessions as judged by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

On the

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Adding fuel to the controversy that Amazon.com (AMZN) will evade paying royalties to authors from its Kindle device, Discovery Communications Inc. (DISCA) sued the online retailer for violating its patent on electronic book technology.

On Tuesday, the media company filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in Delaware accusing Amazon's electronic reader Kindle of infringing intellectual property rights of a patent it had registered in November 2007.

Amazon introduced the second version of Kindle last month for a retail price of $359, calling it the future of book reading. The first model of the wireless device was released in November 2007.

Discovery sought a "fair compensation" through damages for "any future infringement" of the patent but did not seek an injunction preventing sales of the Kindle.

"AMZN" Free Stock Analysis: Buy? Sell? Hold?"DISCA" Free Stock Analysis: Buy? Sell? Hold?...

According to reports in local media, the global electronics retailer Best Buy has started to sell its own brand LCD TVs in China for the first time and these TVs are only available in Best Buy stores. Qian Yan, general manager for public relations at Best BuyChina, said that the retail price for Best Buy's own [...]