stocks

Google's stock closed at an all-time high of $806.85 today, becoming the first tech firm to pass the $800 mark and signaling that Wall Street approves of the company's rumored move into retail stores.

The stock has jumped 14 percent since the start of the year, more than double the Nasdaq's 6.4 percent gain. Its record high comes amid a report, since echoed by the Wall Street Journal, that Google planned to open retail stores to showcase its hardware products. The stores could open by the end of the year, according to the original report … Read more

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- How a movie changed one man's vision forever.

- Google's stock breaks $800 for the first time.

- Report: OfficeMax, Office Depot discussing merger.

- Microsoft moves Outlook.com out of preview.

- Dow 14,000: Stocks near new crest.

- Middle class remains stuck.

- Free File: Do your Federal taxes for free!… Read more

Bruce Livingstone, who founded microstock powerhouse iStockphoto more than a decade ago and left it in 2009, is trying again with a new stock-art sales venture called Stocksy.

And he's doing it at a time when iStock is, if not necessarily vulnerable, the target of criticisms that it's out of touch with the army of photographers who contribute the imagery it licenses. To succeed, a microstock needs lots of customers licensing its photos, videos, and other works, and it needs a lot of contributors supplying a steady stream of fresh material.

It's these contributors Livingstone appears to … Read more

Hedge funds that drove up the price of Apple's stock were also responsible for driving it down, Reuters reported yesterday.

After reaching a high of $705 in September, shares of Apple started getting battered in the fourth quarter.

The stock was especially hit hard after Apple revealed its fiscal first-quarter results last month, numbers that disappointed Wall Street. The company achieved record revenues. But some analysts and investors worried that higher competition and lower profit margins mean that Apple's best days are behind it.

As a result, many of the hedge funds with huge positions in Apple dumped … Read more

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt is planning on selling off about 42 percent of his stock in the search giant, according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Today, Marketwatch reported on the expected sale, suggesting that Schmidt -- currently Google's chairman -- will try to net as much as $2.51 billion from the sale of the stock. To date, he owns as much as 2.3 percent of Google's stock, and has 8.2 percent of the company's voting power.

Schmidt currently owns 7.6 million shares of Google's Class A stock, … Read more

Dozens of lawsuits and investigations emerged after Facebook's initial public offering on the Nasdaq Stock Market last year. One investigation, initiated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, focused on technical errors in Nasdaq's system that inadvertently delayed trading that first day.

Now, word has it that Nasdaq may be able to settle the debacle with the federal regulators, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Sources familiar with the matter have told the Journal that Nasdaq has been in preliminary settlement talks with the SEC. If the two sides do make a deal, it will most likely … Read more

The search giant's shares soared to an all-time high today amid hopes it will soon resolve its European antitrust issues.

Google reportedly handed a settlement proposal to the European Commission yesterday, just making the deadline to respond to an inquiry into possible antitrust issues.

The EU's probe was opened in 2010 when European regulators asked the company to explain how it ranked search results and advertising after complaints of anticompetitive behavior from European businesses. Google has been trying to settle the case since it started as it faces a … Read more

It's a challenge for anybody selling a wide range of anything online: how do you get the right products in front of the right customers?

Shutterstock, which sells stock-art photos and videos to customers such as ad agencies and PowerPoint presenters, has the matchmaking problem in spades. With 550,000 active customers and more than 23.7 million images, pairing the right buyer with the right photo isn't easy.

Which is why the New York-based company, which went public last October, is retooling how it presents its products to better compete with iStockphoto and other rivals.

Shutterstock has … Read more

When Facebook reports its fourth-quarter earnings today, investors will be hyper-focused on how much progress the social network is making on mobile. The rapid shift to mobile has, of course, been the key part of the Facebook story since the company went public in May. First mobile was a giant problem; then CEO Mark Zuckerberg artfully reframed the problem as a giant opportunity.