When should I start saving for retirement?

The answer is simple: as soon as you can. Ideally, you'd start saving in your 20s, when you first leave school and begin earning paychecks. That's because the sooner you begin saving, the more time your money has to grow. Each year's gains can generate their own gains the next year - a powerful wealth-building phenomenon known as compounding.

Here's an example of what a big difference starting young can make. Say you start at age 25, and put aside $3,000 a year in a tax-deferred retirement account for 10 years - and then you stop saving - completely. By the time you reach 65, your $30,000 investment will have grown to more than $472,000, (assuming an 8% annual return), even though you didn't contribute a dime beyond age 35.

Now let's say you put off saving until you turn 35, and then save $3,000 a year for 30 years. By the time you reach 65, you will have set aside $90,000 of your own money, but it will grow to only about $367,000, assuming the same 8% annual return. That's a huge difference.


Estrategia Investimentos S.A.

10 Important resolutions for saving money.

Information from MSNBC

To increase your chances for success, here are a whole bunch of money-related resolutions that most of us can’t afford to break.

If you follow through on just one or two of these, you’ll unavoidably improve your bottom line in the New Year.

1. Slash the incidentals. Carefully read through one of your credit-card statements, staying on the lookout for ongoing monthly fees that you may have utterly forgotten about. Cancel any club memberships you don’t use and magazine subscriptions you don’t read. And if necessary, resolve to stop spending hard-earned money on lottery tickets.

2. Pay yourself first. This is a good time for an honest self-analysis: What have your saving habits been like in the past year? If it seems like all the money you make falls straight through your fingers and gets gobbled up by bills and other expenses, think hard about a reasonable amount you could start to view as yet another monthly bill. Could you handle one more $50 bill? How about a $200 bill? Even if you can only handle one more $15 or $20 bill, that’s better than nothing. Start squirreling that money away for yourself, pronto.

3.Decide where to put that ‘payment.’ If you plan to sock money away for several years until you reach a specific savings goal, your “pay-yourself-first” money could become automatic contributions to a mutual fund or other stock-oriented fund. If you need the money to be more liquid than that, consider an online savings or money market account that gets linked to your current checking account. Many of these online-only accounts are insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) and pay annual percentage yields between 4 percent and 5 percent or even higher, as opposed to paltry yields of about 0.2 percent to 0.5 percent for traditional savings accounts. To find such an account, go to Bankrate.com (www.bankrate.com), find the “Compare rates” section on the home page, select “Checking & Savings,” and then “MMAs/Savings Accounts.” (Just keep choosing MMAs and savings accounts as you click through.)

4. Pay ahead on your mortgage. By paying an extra $100 a month toward the principal on a $150,000, 30-year mortgage with a fixed interest rate of 6.5 percent, you’ll save more than $51,000 in interest and be able to retire your mortgage nearly seven years early. An extra monthly payment of even $20 or $25 can make a surprising difference. Granted, you’d stand to benefit more if you could invest that extra payment in an interest-bearing account offering a guaranteed higher rate of return than your mortgage rate. And paying off your mortgage early means you won’t have the tax benefits of home ownership for the same number of years. But if you’re after the psychological benefit of owning your home outright and spending far less on interest over time, then the extra-payment approach is the way to go.

5. Shed credit-card debt. Of course, the best way to avoid creating problems for yourself in 2007 is to use your credit cards cautiously and sparingly, always being sure to pay the entire balance off in full and on time each month. But if you’re already in a serious credit-card pickle as 2006 winds to a close – as millions of people are – try this: Transfer your credit-card balances to a card with a lower interest rate ASAP. You’ll save $730 if you transfer a $2,000 balance from an 18-percent card to an 8.25-percent card and then pay off your balance at a rate of $50 a month. Better yet, transfer balances to cards with rates of 0, 1 or 2 percent and concentrate on paying them off entirely while those low rates last.

6. Say goodbye to late fees. If you keep finding yourself getting hit with extra finance charges because your credit-card bill is regularly due before you’ve received your paycheck, call the credit-card company and ask to have your due date changed. It might take a few months for this change to kick in, but it’s well worth the wait.

7. Take your last puff. Depending on the wallop packed by the “sin taxes” where you live, you could save more than $2,000 a year if you go from being a pack-a-day smoker to a non-smoker. You’ll also qualify for significantly cheaper life-insurance rates after you quit.

8. Max out your retirement savings. Contribute as much as you can to a 401(k) or 403(b) tax-deferred retirement plan. You’ll get an automatic tax break, plus your employer may match part of your contribution – often 50 cents for each dollar you contribute for up to 6 percent of your pay. If your employer doesn’t offer this benefit, open a traditional individual retirement account or a Roth IRA and start saving anyway.

9. Review your estate plan. Do you have a will or a living trust? If not, get that taken care of this year! If you already have such documents drawn up, make sure they’re up to date. This is especially important if you recently had children or if kids might be in your future – but no matter what, these are vital steps for everyone to take regardless of their marital or family status.

10. Analyze your workday expenses. Instead of eating in restaurants every single day, bring your lunch to work from home as often as you can. Take your clothes to the dry cleaners early to avoid paying extra for same-day service. If it’s feasible where you live, try commuting to work by bus or by another form of public transportation. It could save you money and give you added reading and relaxation time.

Sources:

Kiplinger’s Personal Finance magazine

Bankrate.com

The New York Times’ Home Finance Center

Estrategia Investimentos S.A.

Facebook Grows to 1 Billion Users, Creates Video to Show Global Reach

In order to celebrate the historical number of  one billion users, Facebook has made a promotional video filmed by mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu in where is told the best of staying on Facebook, here the history from Bloomberg.com:  

By Douglas MacMillan

Facebook, operator of the world’s largest social-networking site, commemorated its growth to one billion users with a promotional video shot by Academy Award-nominated Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu.

The 90-second clip, filmed in four cities, features groups of people from around the world, from a basketball game in Los Angeles to a massive rally in Buenos Aires. Facebook posted the video today, and plans to make versions of it available in 12 languages.

In its first major brand advertisement, Facebook has chosen to emphasize its far-reaching global network over its technology prowess. Promoting the social network in developing markets has become more of a focus for the company as user growth in the U.S. shows signs of slowing.

“There was a desire to create something that articulates who we are and why we exist,” Rebecca Van Dyck, Facebook’s head of consumer marketing, said in an interview. “Reaching one billion as a milestone is a great reminder to us of all the people we serve, no matter where they are.”

Facebook is promoting the video on its own site by showing it in the news feeds of people who “like” Facebook or Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s chief executive officer. Van Dyck said she wouldn’t rule out the ad appearing in other formats, such as television.

The social network hired ad agency Wieden & Kennedy for the project a year ago. This past spring, it tapped Oscar nominee Inarritu, the director of “Babel” and “21 Grams.”

The budget for the video was comparable to the amount advertisers typically spend on a brand advertisement, said Van Dyck, who left her job as chief marketing officer at Levi Strauss & Co. in February to join Facebook. Wieden & Kennedy will remain Facebook’s agency of record, the company said.

Since its creation in Zuckerberg’s Harvard University dorm room in 2004, Facebook has expanded around the world and is available in more than 70 languages. It still faces competition in markets such as Russia, where local site VKontakte tops Facebook with about 100 million users, as well as political barriers in places such as China, where the site has been blocked by government censors.

Zuckerberg visited Russia earlier this week, appearing on a television show and encouraging local companies to develop programs for the social network. Expansion has taken on more urgency since the company’s May initial public offering, as investor concerns about a slowdown in sales growth have contributed to a 43 percent decline in its shares since the IPO.

The new advertisement, set to a song by instrumental rock band Explosions in the Sky, features scenes from New Orleans, Los Angeles, Buenos Aires and Portland, Oregon.

Information from Bloomberg.com

Thanks for reading us!

Estrategia Investimentos S.A.

How to invest from $20 to any amount of money.

Got only $20 to put away right now?

It may not sound like much, but you can use it to buy shares in Intel. Or Johnson & Johnson. Or Harley-Davidson (you rebel). And those are just a few of more than 1,000 options available. What if you've got $100 -- or $1,000? Your options are even greater.

We're not here to tell you where to invest your money. We won't lay out a handful of stocks on a "buy" list. But what we can tell you is how you can invest your money -- the mechanics of investing small, large, and medium amounts of cash. We can even help you choose a broker.

How to invest $20
Let's start with $20. We're going to assume that you've already paid off any high-interest debt and that you have some money stashed in a safe place (like a savings or money market account) that you can get to quickly in case of an emergency expense. Now you find yourself with a little extra dough, and you want to begin investing for your future.

Is it even worth it to invest such a pittance?

Heck yeah it is! One of the best ways to invest small amounts of money cheaply is through Dividend Reinvestment Plans (DRPs), also known as Drips. They and their cousins, Direct Stock Purchase Plans (DSPs), allow you to bypass brokers (and their commissions) by buying stock directly from the companies or their agents.

More than 1,000 major corporations offer these types of stock plans, many of them free, or with fees low enough to make it worthwhile to invest as little as $20 or $30 at a time. Drips are ideal for those who are starting out with small amounts to invest and want to make frequent purchases (dollar-cost averaging). Once you're in the plan, you can set up an automatic payment plan, and you don't even have to buy a full share each time you make a contribution.

Drips may be one of the surest, steadiest ways to build wealth over your lifetime (just make sure you keep good records for tax purposes). For more details on Drips, see "What if I can only invest small amounts of money every month?"

How to invest a couple of hundred bucks 
So you've weeded out all the wooden nickels from your spare-change jar and have tallied up a few hundred bucks. Instead of blowing it on snack food and Elvis memorabilia, consider investing it in an index fund (the only kind of mutual fund Fools like). An index fund that tracks the S&P 500 is your ticket to an investment that has traditionally returned about 10% per year.

Some index funds require as little as $250 for you to call yourself an owner. This low minimum is usually restricted to IRAs (Individual Retirement Accounts). After your initial investment, you can add as much money as you like, as frequently as you like, with no additional costs or commissions. You purchase index funds directly from mutual fund companies, so there are no commissions to pay to a middleman.

If you have a few hundred dollars to start with, then this is a great, low-cost way to establish an instant, widely diversified (500 companies!) portfolio.

How to invest $500 
Once you're up to $500, your investment options open up a bit more. You can still buy an index fund, and now you'll have your pick of fund companies that require higher initial investments. This freedom will enable you to shop around for a fund with the lowest expense ratio.

You should also seriously consider opening a discount brokerage account. You'll want to focus on the account option that best serves your needs; some accounts require a minimum initial deposit, and some don't. That means you can open up an account with whatever investing money you have available, and start researching and perhaps purchasing individual companies. (Or, if you're enamored of index investing, you can easily invest in Spiders, a stock-like investment that mimics the performance of the S&P 500.)

The key here is to keep your costs of investing (including brokerage fees) to less than 2% of the transaction value. So if you're planning to add to your position in stocks a few times a month, a Drip or an index fund may still be the way to go.

How to invest $1,000-plus 
What can you do with a grand? Obviously, with $1,000 you can open up a discount brokerage account, but look at the rewards if you can scrape up an additional $1,000 a year to add to your original investment.

Say you've got 40 years to retirement. If you start with $1,000 and invest an additional $1,000 each year, and your money earns 10% annually, then when you're ready to retire at age 65, you'll have $532,111.07. That seems worth it to us. If you have earned income, you can set up a Roth IRA, and you won't even pay any taxes on that $532K when you withdraw it. (As always, your mileage may vary.)

Again, even at this level, the key is to keep fees from eating up your earnings. So make sure that the costs of investing (including brokerage commissions, stamps to mail in checks, and books that help you learn to invest) are less than 2% of your account's overall worth. With small accounts, that can be a challenge, but with such low commissions being offered by discount brokers, it's definitely doable.

Information taken from: http://www.fool.com/

Estrategia Investimentos S.A.

The Patent, Used as a Sword

When Apple announced last year that all iPhones would come with a voice-activated assistant named Siri, capable of answering spoken questions, Michael Phillips’s heart sank.

For three decades, Mr. Phillips had focused on writing software to allow computers to understand human speech. In 2006, he had co-founded a voice recognition company, and eventually executives at Apple, Google and elsewhere proposed partnerships. Mr. Phillips’s technology was even integrated into Siri itself before the digital assistant was absorbed into the iPhone.

But in 2008, Mr. Phillips’s company, Vlingo, had been contacted by a much larger voice recognition firm called Nuance. “I have patents that can prevent you from practicing in this market,” Nuance’s chief executive, Paul Ricci, told Mr. Phillips, according to executives involved in that conversation.

Mr. Ricci issued an ultimatum: Mr. Phillips could sell his firm to Mr. Ricci or be sued for patent infringements. When Mr. Phillips refused to sell, Mr. Ricci’s company filed the first of six lawsuits.

Soon after, Apple and Google stopped returning phone calls. The company behind Siri switched its partnership from Mr. Phillips to Mr. Ricci’s firm. And the millions of dollars Mr. Phillips had set aside for research and development were redirected to lawyers and court fees.

When the first lawsuit went to trial last year, Mr. Phillips won. In the companies’ only courtroom face-off, a jury ruled that Mr. Phillips had not infringed on a broad voice recognition patent owned by Mr. Ricci’s company.

But it was too late. The suit had cost $3 million, and the financial damage was done. In December, Mr. Phillips agreed to sell his company to Mr. Ricci. “We were on the brink of changing the world before we got stuck in this legal muck,” Mr. Phillips said.

Mr. Phillips and Vlingo are among the thousands of executives and companies caught in a software patent system that federal judges, economists, policy makers and technology executives say is so flawed that it often stymies innovation.

Alongside the impressive technological advances of the last two decades, they argue, a pall has descended: the marketplace for new ideas has been corrupted by software patents used as destructive weapons.

Vlingo was a tiny upstart on this battlefield, but as recent litigation involving Apple and Samsung shows, technology giants have also waged wars among themselves.

In the smartphone industry alone, according to a Stanford University analysis, as much as $20 billion was spent on patent litigation and patent purchases in the last two years — an amount equal to eight Mars rover missions. Last year, for the first time, spending by Apple and Google on patent lawsuits and unusually big-dollar patent purchases exceeded spending on research and development of new products, according to public filings.

Patents are vitally important to protecting intellectual property. Plenty of creativity occurs within the technology industry, and without patents, executives say they could never justify spending fortunes on new products. And academics say that some aspects of the patent system, like protections for pharmaceuticals, often function smoothly.

However, many people argue that the nation’s patent rules, intended for a mechanical world, are inadequate in today’s digital marketplace. Unlike patents for new drug formulas, patents on software often effectively grant ownership of concepts, rather than tangible creations. Today, the patent office routinely approves patents that describe vague algorithms or business methods, like a software system for calculating online prices, without patent examiners demanding specifics about how those calculations occur or how the software operates.

As a result, some patents are so broad that they allow patent holders to claim sweeping ownership of seemingly unrelated products built by others. Often, companies are sued for violating patents they never knew existed or never dreamed might apply to their creations, at a cost shouldered by consumers in the form of higher prices and fewer choices.

“There’s a real chaos,” said Richard A. Posner, a federal appellate judge who has helped shape patent law, in an interview. “The standards for granting patents are too loose.”

Almost every major technology company is involved in ongoing patent battles, but the most significant player is Apple, industry executives say, because of its influence and the size of its claims: in August in California, the company won a $1 billion patent infringement judgment against Samsung. Former Apple employees say senior executives made a deliberate decision over the last decade, after Apple was a victim of patent attacks, to use patents as leverage against competitors to the iPhone, the company’s biggest source of profits.

With information from The New York Times.

Estrategia Investimentos

Estrategia Investimentos S.A.

Retirement Planning 2.0: Retrain Your Brain for Financial Success

As seen on Bloomberg News:

Dismal market returns haven’t exactly created a tailwind for 401(k) and IRA portfolios over the last decade or so, but an equally pernicious -- and more entrenched -- problem is that our brains are messing with our retirement plans.

“We are wired for financial defeat,” says Rapid City, South Dakota, certified financial planner Rick Kahler. “Whatever has the most emotional juice right now is what gets our attention. Invest $5,000 in your IRA for a retirement that is 10, 20, 30 years away? Or spend the $5,000 for a vacation to the Bahamas?” All too often, the Bahamas wins out.

William Meyer, founder of Social Security Solutions, notes that our thirst for immediate gratification can easily take a six-figure toll. More than two-thirds of folks opt to claim a lower Social Security benefit starting as early as age 62. For a married couple, than can mean leaving as much as $100,000 on the table. “If you wait to claim until age 70, you’re locking in a benefit that is 76 percent larger," says Meyer.

More productive planning

Forever tweaking your asset allocation probably won’t get you near the retirement payoff that tweaking your brain will achieve. Consider these strategies for engaging your brain in more productive retirement planning:

Get Thee to a Calculator, Pronto: OK, you know you probably should be saving more for retirement. And when life keeps intervening -- that Bahamas vacation you and yours really really need, or the realization that the kid’s orthodontia isn’t covered by insurance -- you tell yourself that next year, you’ll ramp up your savings rate. You’ve got plenty of time, right?

What you may not realize is how expensive that time is. Research conducted by Craig McKenzie, a psychology professor at the University of California, San Diego, shows that we have a tendency to “massively underestimate the cost of waiting to save. It’s difficult to appreciate the difference between giving yourself 20 years to save and 40 years.”

For example, a 30-year-old who is saving $10,000 a year and earning an annualized 6 percent will have $1.2 million at age 65. Care to guess what someone starting at 45 will have? About $390,000. The younger saver invests $150,000 more than the 45-year-old does, and in return has an ending balance that's $800,000 larger. Even if you’re already past your 20s and 30s, you might find it eye-opening to see how extending your investment timeline by delaying retirement on the back end of the calculation can help matters. Your company retirement plan probably has an online calculator you can play with; or try this one.

Make it Personal: How you frame retirement savings decisions can help boost your ability to delay gratification. When individuals were asked if they'd prefer to have $3,400 in one month or $3,800 in two months, 57 percent chose the latter. When the same scenario was framed in terms of one’s personal age -- “when you are 2 months older” -- 83 percent chose to wait for the bigger payoff.

How does that translate to better retirement planning? Yale School of Management marketing professor Shane Frederick, one of the study’s authors, says a 50-year-old who frames a savings goal as “when I am 65” will likely be more patient to focus on that delayed gratification, than someone who frames it as a more generic “in 15 years.”

Time Travel: Another unique challenge for retirement planning is that the end goal is so far away that it’s hard to see how actions we take or don’t take today will have a huge impact on our older selves. When researchers showed individuals doctored photos of their future selves, the human guinea pigs said they would save more than twice as much for retirement, compared to a control group that wasn’t given a glimpse of their older self.

Work is afoot to bring this visual exercise to a 401(k) plan near you. In the meantime, Hal Hershfield, who led the research, says he wouldn’t recommending using apps that age your face. “They're just not accurate enough, and I think seeing a strange-looking version of your future self may actually have the perverse effect of causing you to identify less.”

Hershfield, an assistant professor of marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business, says new research that has yet to be published shows that simply writing a letter to your future self can help you become more invested in the welfare of that older person. “In a way, this task is a very low-tech version of the age-progression [photo morphing] techniques: Both have the same goal of creating a more vivid image of the future self.” Hershfield says hanging out with older folks -- parents, grandparents, volunteering with an organization for the elderly -- can also have a beneficial impact on your resolve to save more today.

Channel Ulysses. Most of us suffer from a bad case of recency bias, the tendency to extrapolate that whatever is happening today will keep happening. That’s why it’s so hard to buy low and sell high. If your recent experience is a falling market and bad returns, it’s not exactly easy to belly up to the bar and buy stocks, or simply stay committed to what you already own.

A Ulysses Contract -- a one-page statement that lays out your long-term strategy and the fact that you’re committed to staying the course -- can be a line of defense against over-reacting to current events. Like the Greek warrior, you are pre-planning for how you will circumvent alluring emotional sirens that can thwart your retirement plan.

For example, a sample Ulysses contract -- created by the Allianz Global Investors Center for Behavioral Finance for financial advisers to use with clients -- includes this passage: “Should the portfolio value decline by 25 percent, we commit to avoid the urge to panic and sell the portfolio. Similarly, should the portfolio value increase by 25 percent, we commit to avoid the urge to chase the hottest investments.”

Another useful step is to include a clause in your contract saying that before you ever deviate from your plan, you will write down your rationale. As Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahnemann explained in his book, "Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow," you don’t want to cede all power to the quick-twitch intuitive part of your brain. Slowing down and simply writing down why you want to change course triggers more deliberate rational thinking. That’s the key to getting ahead and staying ahead.

Estrategia Investimentos S.A.

U.S. Stocks Rise on Economic Reports Amid Draghi Comments

Play
Initial Jobless Claims Increase From Two-Month Low

U.S. stocks rose, sending the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index higher for a fourth day, as reports on jobless claims and factory orders were better than forecast and theEuropean Central Bank said it stands ready to buy bonds. Financial and commodity companies rose the most, climbing at least 1 percent, as Bank of America Corp. (BAC) and Consol Energy Inc. (CNX) rallied more than 2.1 percent. TJX Cos. and Target Corp. (TGT) gained among retailers after September same-store sales topped estimates. Hewlett-Packard Co. slumped for second day after Chief Executive OfficerMeg Whitman’s turnaround strategy failed to convince investors looking for a speedier recovery.
The S&P 500 increased 0.5 percent to 1,458.02 at 11:36 a.m. in New York. The benchmark index has rallied 1.2 percent this week. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 67.54 points, or 0.5 percent, to 13,562.15. Trading in S&P 500 companies was 24 percent above the 30-day average at this time of day.
“In the last several weeks, we have coordinated global monetary stimulus, and that’s starting to show up in the change of trends in American economic statistics,” Douglas Cote, chief market strategist at New York-based ING U.S. Investment Management, said in a phone interview. His firm oversees about $165 billion. “Employment, manufacturing, services and consumer sentiment have all gone from weakening to strengthening.”
U.S. stocks rose as Labor Department figures showed applications for jobless benefits increased 4,000 to 367,000 in the week ended Sept. 29. Economists forecast 370,000 claims, according to the median estimate in a Bloomberg survey. Orders placed with U.S. factories fell 5.2 percent in August, the Commerce Department said. The median forecast of economists in a Bloomberg News survey called for a decline of 5.9 percent.

ECB Rates

ECB President Mario Draghi said the bank is ready to start buying government bonds as soon as the necessary conditions are fulfilled. The ECB kept interest ratesunchanged at a historic low of 0.75 percent.
The S&P 500 rose for a third day yesterday after ADP Employer Services said companies added 162,000 jobs last month, exceeding economists’ estimates. Tomorrow’s government jobs report may show that the economy created 115,000 jobs last month and the unemployment rate increased to 8.2 percent from 8.1 percent, economists forecast.
The Federal Open Market Committee will release the minutes of its latest policy meeting at 2 p.m. today.

‘Market Prism’

“The jobless claims report was OK and Draghi is signaling he will do whatever it takes, so I’m not expecting him to take his foot off the accelerator,” Philip Orlando, the New York- based chief equity strategist at Federated Investors Inc. which oversees about $370 billion, said in a phone interview. “Every data point in the U.S. will be viewed through a market prism and a political prism now.”
Companies that are most tied to economic swings led the gains as the Morgan Stanley Cyclical Index climbed 0.8 percent.
Financial shares rose the most among 10 groups in the S&P 500, climbing 1.1 percent. Bank of America rallied 2.8 percent to $9.37, while Citigroup Inc. (C) gained 2.1 percent to $34.76.
American International Group Inc. (AIG) rose 2.1 percent to $34.91. Daniel Loeb’s $9.3 billion Third Point LLC hedge fund added shares last quarter, betting the stock will rise as the U.S. cuts a stake acquired in the insurer’s rescue. AIG shares have “significant upside,” the New York-based fund said in a letter to investors.

Energy Shares

Energy shares advanced as oil rebounded from a two-month low and analysts forecast an end to coal’s longest slump in seven years. Consol Energy jumped 4.4 percent to $31.02 while Tesoro Corp. (TSO) increased 3.5 percent to $44.05.
TJX gained 0.8 percent to $45.56. Sales at the discount clothing seller climbed 6 percent, beating the average estimate for a 4.4 percent gain from analysts surveyed by researcher Retail Metrics Inc.
Target added 0.9 percent to $63.64. The second-largest U.S. discounter posted a 2.1 percent increase in same-store sales, topping the 2 percent projection.
Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) slumped 2.8 percent to $14.50 after plunging 13 percent yesterday. Meeting with analysts a year after taking over, CEO Whitman yesterday outlined steps that include more focus on corporate customers, narrower product lines and multi-featured machines, such as printers that double as scanners and copiers. She also said the turnaround wouldn’t happen any time soon and projected 2013 profit that missed analysts’ estimates.
Sprint Nextel Corp. (S) decreased 2.4 percent to $5.08, paring an earlier drop of 5.4 percent. The third-largest U.S. wireless carrier is in the early stages of evaluating whether it should make a counter offer for MetroPCS Communications Inc. to top Deutsche Telekom AG’s bid to combine it with T-Mobile USA, said three people familiar with the offer.

Estrategia Investimentos S.A.