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Earnings results often indicate what direction a company will take in the months ahead. With Q4 behind us, let’s have a look at Lincoln Financial Group (NYSE:LNC) and its peers. Life insurance companies collect premiums from policyholders in exchange for providing a future death benefit or retirement income stream. Interest rates matter for the sector (and make it cyclical), with higher rates allowing insurers to reinvest their fixed-income portfolios at more attractive yields and vice versa. Additionally, favorable demographic shifts, such as an aging population, are driving strong demand for retirement products while AI and data analytics offer significant opportunities to improve underwriting accuracy and operational efficiency. Conversely, the industry faces headwinds from persistent...

Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square Capital Management has proposed a massive cash-and-stock acquisition of Universal Music Group (UMG), the creative home of Taylor Swift, Drake, and Bad Bunny. UMG stock soared 13% on Tuesday following the announcement. The deal, valued at approximately $64 billion, would merge UMG with Pershing Square SPARC Holdings, an acquisition vehicle. The move would create "New UMG," an SEC-registered corporation in Nevada that would be listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and report under US GAAP standards. Invest in Gold Powered by Money.com - Yahoo may earn commission from the links above. Pershing is Universal's fourth-largest shareholder with a 4.74% stake. In a letter to the UMG board, Ackman argued that the company's current valuation ...

Bill Ackman Wants to Put Universal on a Bigger Stage - Moby Bill Ackman is back for another shot at Universal Music Group. The Pershing Square boss has pitched a roughly €55 billion (about $64 billion) deal for the world’s biggest record label, arguing that UMG is being valued like a sleepy European listing instead of a global entertainment heavyweight. His fix is classic Ackman: move it to New York, tighten the story, shake up the board, and hope Wall Street starts humming a different tune. Pershing Square has proposed a cash-and-stock transaction for Universal Music Group that values the company at €30.40 a share, or about €55.8 billion. Under the proposal, UMG shareholders would receive €9.4 billion in cash overall, equal to €5.05 per share, plus 0.77 shares in a newly...

NEW YORK, April 7 (Reuters) - Gautam Adani, India's second richest person, will ask a ‌U.S. judge to dismiss the Securities ‌and Exchange Commission's civil fraud case against him, his lawyers ​said on Tuesday. Adani and his nephew Sagar Adani were charged by the SEC in November 2024 with orchestrating a scheme to pay or promise ‌to pay hundreds ⁠of millions of dollars in bribes to Indian government officials to benefit ⁠Adani Green Energy, where both men are executives and directors. The securities fraud case is tied ​to Adani ​Green's alleged failure to ​disclose the scheme ‌in documents for a $750 million bond offering in 2021. In a filing in the Brooklyn, New York federal court, Adani's lawyers said the SEC claims were "impermissibly extraterritorial," given that the defen...

Pershing Square logo Ackman proposes merging UMG into an SEC-registered "New UMG" that would pay shareholders ~€5 cash plus 0.77 New UMG shares (total consideration ~€30.40, a 78% premium), effectively a €22 buyback and cancellation of ~17% of shares, with Pershing Square funding the deal via €2.5bn of equity/backstop, €5.4bn of debt and €1.5bn from a Spotify sale and boosting its stake to 11.7%. The plan monetizes UMG’s ~€2.7bn Spotify stake to deliver about €1.5bn to shareholders after taxes and artist shares, targets a 2.5x net debt/adjusted-EBITDA leverage while keeping investment-grade flexibility, and changes the dividend policy from a 50% net-income payout to growing the dividend at 2% per year. The proposal calls for a U.S. listing on the NYSE as a Nevada corporation wit...

Find your next quality investment with Simply Wall St's easy and powerful screener, trusted by over 7 million individual investors worldwide. Axos Financial (AX) has drawn investor attention recently, with shares last closing at $86.78 and showing a mixed return pattern over the past week, month, and past 3 months. See our latest analysis for Axos Financial. Recent trading has been choppy, with a 1-day share price return of 1.66% and a 7-day share price return of 4.71%. Over the longer term, the 1-year total shareholder return of 51.93% suggests that momentum has been stronger over time than in recent months. If Axos Financial has you looking more broadly at financials and market trends, it could be a good moment to broaden your search with 20 top founder-led companies With...

UnitedHealth Group (UNH) and other health insurer stocks surged on Tuesday after the US government said it would boost payments for Medicare Advantage plans next year. The US Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) said it would increase payments to insurers for older Americans by an average of 2.48% in 2027, amounting to a $13 billion annual increase in payments to plans. UnitedHealth stock jumped 8%, while Humana (HUM) popped 5%, and Aetna's parent company, CVS Health (CVS), rose more than 4%. The payment bump was much higher than the 0.09% payment increase CMS initially proposed in January. "Final rates typically rise from initial rate notices, and we think investors appreciated that pattern remaining intact, despite the ongoing regulatory pressure on this end mark...

Choosing a crypto exchange isn't just a matter of picking the most recognizable name. The platform you use affects how much you pay on every trade, which coins you can actually buy, and how well your funds are protected. We put the most widely used U.S. exchanges through hands-on testing by verifying fees in live accounts, comparing coin selections, evaluating security practices, and checking how each platform actually performs for real users. Here’s how they stack up. Best overall: Kraken Best for reliability: Coinbase Best for active traders: OKX Best for rewards and ecosystem: Crypto.com Best for beginners: eToro Best for currency and commodity traders: Uphold Best for security-conscious investors: Gemini Exchange Our rating Beginner trading fees ...

CMS proposed payment rule follows a call for new oversight of hospice provider fraud.The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has proposed a 2.4% payment increase for hospice providers for 2027.This is an estimated increase of $785 million in payments from 2026, according to CMS. The payment is the result of a proposed 3.2% inpatient hospital market basket percentage increase reduced, as required by law, by a proposed 0.8 percentage point productivity adjustment, CMS said. Hospices that do not submit the required quality data would see a decrease of 4 percentage points, as required by law, which would result in a 1.6% reduction over the previous year's payment rate. Comments on the proposed rule are due by June 1.Leading Age is a nonprofit community of aging services providers. Lin...

On March 30, 2026, as part of the Trump Administration’s commitment to rooting out fraud against the government, the United States Department of the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (“FinCEN”) issued an advisory “to urge financial institutions to be vigilant in identifying and reporting suspicious transactions potentially related to health care fraud schemes targeting Medicare, Medicaid, and other Federal and state health care benefit programs.” This advisory applies to a broad range of those in the financial sector including banks, broker dealers, investment companies, insurance companies, certain real estate businesses, and more. FinCEN also proposed new rulemaking for its whistleblower program, which appears to be aimed at financial institutions who do not adequately dete...