PRE-MARKET | December 19, 2016 | $WMB, $DIS Disney Added to BofA’s US 1 List, $125 PT

1. GSAT: $GSAT GlobalStar’s Revised Wi-Fi Proposal Put on Circulation by FCC – Bloomberg

2. TNXP:  $TNXP Tonix Pharmaceuticals Granted FDA Breakthrough Therapy Designation for TNX-102 SL – SI

3. AWH:  $AWH Watsa’s Fairfax Agrees to Buy Allied World for $4.9 Billion – BBG

4. LOXO:  $LOXO Loxo Oncology Aims for Genetic Mutation Cancer Drug Approval in 2018 – Adam Feuerstein

5. LEN:  $LEN Lennar Expects Housing Recovery to Continue Despite Rising Interest Rates – WSJ

6. ASML:  $ASML Bank of America / Merrill Lynch has upgraded the shares of the Dutch chipmaker to buy from neutral

7. CY:  $CY BofA/Merrill Lynch Starts Cypress Semi at Buy, $16 T

8. WMB:  $WMB Morgan Stanley Upgrades Williams Companies to Overweight, $35 PT

9. DIS:  $DIS Disney Added to BofA’s US 1 List, $125 PT

10. BMY:  $BMY Jefferies Upgrades Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. to Buy, $69 PT

11. KLAC:  $KLAC Goldman Sachs Starts KLA-Tencor at Buy, $90 PT

12. COST:  $COST Citi Upgrades Costco Wholesale to Buy

13. TEX:  $TEX UBS Upgrades Terex to Buy, $40 PT

14. UTX:  $UTX Credit Suisse Upgrades United Technologies to Outperform Amid Earnings Recovery, $125 PT

15. CBS, SNE:  $SNE CBS $CBS boss jets to Japan in possible bid for Sony Pictures – NYPost

16. MOS, VALE:  $VALE Mosaic $MOS to Buy Vale”s Fertilizer Business for $2.5 Billion – Nasdaq Read more:

17. WCG: $WCG WellCare Health Plans Sees FY17 EPS of $6.00-$6.25, Versus the Consensus of $6.31 – SI

18. AAPL: $AAPL Apple Fights $13.6 Billion Tax Bill as EU Lifts Lid on Case – BBG

19. IONS: $IONS Ionis Pharma’s rare metabolic disorder drug succeeds key study – Reuters

20. AMAT: $AMAT Goldman Sachs Downgrades Applied Materials to Neutral, $35 PT

21. MRK:  $MRK Jefferies Downgrades Merck to Underperform, $48 PT

22. SUN:  $SUN BofA/Merrill Lynch Downgrades Sunoco to Neutral, $27 PT

23. DB:  $DB Deutsche Bank to pay to end ‘Dark Pool’ probe – MW

24. DB: $DB Citi Downgrades Deutsche Bank to Sell

25. MT:  $MT UBS Downgrades Arcelor Mittal to Sell

26. JAKK:  $JAKK JAKKS Pacific Warns for FY16 – SI

1. ASML:Bank of America $ASML upgraded to buy from Neutral

2. BMY:$BMY Jefferies Upgrades Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. to Buy, $69 PT

3. CFR:SunTrust Upgrades Cullen/Frost Bankers $CFR to Buy

4. CMA:Stephens Upgrades Comerica $CMA to Overweight

5. COST:$COST Citi Upgrades Costco Wholesale to Buy

6. DXCM:UPDATE: Oppenheimer Upgrades DexCom $DXCM to Outperform

7. ETFC, SCHW:Charles Schwab , E*Trade upgraded to buy from hold at SunTrust. $SCHW $ETFC…

8. GPOR:Stephens Upgrades Gulfport Energy $GPOR to Overweight

9. HUBS:Raymond James Upgrades HubSpot Inc $HUBS to Strong Buy

10. LRCX:Goldman Sachs Upgrades Lam Research $LRCX and Adds to Conviction Buy List

11. MS, WMB:$WMB upgraded to Overweight from Equal-Weight at $MS Chart has built big base 28-32 and has room to 34-36 pays 2.5% div use 28 as a STOP

12. RLGY:#Realogy upgraded to buy from hold at Wedbush. Price target $32. $RLGY 12/16 close: 25.61 #RealEstate #stocks

13. TEX:$TEX UBS Upgrades Terex to Buy, $40 PT

14. UTX:$UTX Credit Suisse Upgrades United Technologies to Outperform Amid Earnings Recovery, $125 PT

15. WMB:$WMB Morgan Stanley Upgrades Williams Companies to Overweight, $35 PT

1. AMAT:$AMAT Goldman Sachs Downgrades Applied Materials to Neutral, $35 PT

2. AMBC:Ambac -7% after downgrade

3. AMP:Ameriprise Finl. was Downgraded to a Hold Rating at SunTrust Robinson $AMP

4. AMP, ETFC, SCHW:Ameriprise downgraded at SunTrust; E*Trade, Schwab boosted

5. AUY:BMO Capital Downgrades Yamana Gold $AUY to Market Perform

6. DB:$DB Citi Downgrades Deutsche Bank to Sell

7. MRK:$MRK Jefferies Downgrades Merck to Underperform, $48 PT

8. MT:$MT UBS Downgrades Arcelor Mittal to Sell

9. SUN:$SUN BofA/Merrill Lynch Downgrades Sunoco to Neutral, $27 PT

1. LEN:$LEN reports FQ4 earnings of $1.34 EPS and $3.38B Revs –

Trending Social Alerts

1. JUNO:Two takes on the outcome of the $KITE vs $JUNO IPR

2. LOXO:$LOXO halted

3. CERS:$CERS Cerus SPARC Trial Has Reached Enrollment Target of at Least 70 Patients

4. KITE:$JUNO Defeats Kite Pharma’s Challenge to CAR T-Cell Patent. $KITE #biotech

5. QURE:$QURE Appoints Matthew Kapusta as Chief Executive Officer

6. XGTI:$XGTI xG Technology Signs Final Definitive Business Purchase Agreement to Acquire Vislink Communication Systems

1. The best biopharma CEOs of 2016 are…

2. Loxo Oncology aims for genetic mutation cancer drug approval in 2018

3. Goldman Warns China Outflows Are Rising

4. Investor Relations

5. Kite Pharma Announces Successful Defense of Roberts Patent and Intent to Appeal U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Decision on a Narrow Patent Focused on Select CD28 CAR-T Products (NASDAQ:KITE)

6. Barclays Severing Ties With Up to 7,000 Business Clients

7. Sage Therapeutics Announces Initiation of Phase 2 Clinical Development for SAGE-217 in Mood Disorders

1. If you find yourself sparring about politics on Twitter, chances are you’re fighting with a bot

People who head to Twitter to discuss their ideals are often unwittingly conversing with legions of bots accounts preprogrammed to spew the same campaign slogans insults or conspiracy theories hundreds or thousands of times a day.

Some are designed to jockey for social media position with the propaganda bots while others set out to unmask nefarious actors distract enemies redirect public attention to the messages they value or even build morale among human activists.

Traffic being shut down on Connecticut Avenue after a man fired a gun inside a Washington pizza restaurant that was the subject of a fake news report about a child sex Jim Lo Pressphoto Agency Propaganda bots made a powerful showing during Election.

2. We uncovered a network of over 40 sites that have published more than 750 fake news stories:

Many of the fake stories identified by BuzzFeed News followed the exact same pattern They falsely reported that a big celebrity was moving to a specific town or community.

To try and identify the owner BuzzFeed News followed a trail from the fake sites to a group of websites about topics including nurses and photos of Jennifer Love Hewitt and eventually to a house in the small city of Atascadero California where a man named Justin Smithson resides.

One morning in early March a staffer for venerable website Snopes logged on to the main email account to read the tips and questions that had flowed in overnight.

3. story of Google AI in @NYTmag is masterfully told but note: not a woman to be seen, not even referenced in passing

The brain can operate in circumstances in which information is poor or missing it can withstand significant damage without total loss of control it can store a huge amount of knowledge in a very efficient way it can isolate distinct patterns but retain the messiness necessary to handle ambiguity.

The Linguistic Turn The hundred or so current members of Brain it often feels less like a department within a colossal corporate hierarchy than it does a club or a scholastic society or an intergalactic cantina came in the intervening years to count among the freest and most widely admired employees in the entire Google organization.

This February research organization the loose division of the company roughly a thousand employees in all dedicated to the and the unclassifiable convened their leads at an offsite retreat at the Westin Francis on Union Square a luxury hotel slightly less splendid than own San Francisco shop a mile or so to the east.

4. This important case could help restore balance and fairness in patent litigation.

Last year almost of all cases were filed in the Eastern District of Texas a relatively rural part of the country that has no major technology industry.

When patent owners can drag defendants into court in corners of the country it can cause significant harm especially for those who are on the receiving end of a frivolous lawsuit.

glad to see that the Supreme Court has agreed to hear this important case that could significantly curtail some of the worst actors in the patent game.

5. Upcoming SCOTUS case “may fundamentally change where patent cases are heard,” says SLS’s @marklemley via @WSJ

ET Supreme Court on Wednesday agreed to take up a major issue that affects patent litigation against businesses ability of patent holders to funnel infringement claims through courts with a reputation.

The announcement was welcome news for corporate defendants that long have lamented rules that allow patent claims in almost any location.

A few federal court.

6. How half a million people are being paid pennies to train AI >Really sad. And they’re training their replacements

In a paper called Turkopticon Interrupting Worker Invisibility in Amazon Mechanical Turk the authors stated We argued that AMT is predicated on infrastructuring and hiding human labor rendering it a reliable computational resource for technologists.

In one year after AMT launched Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said a human was needed to spot whether a person was in a photo a task that can now be carried out by deep learning neural networks run by the likes of Baidu Facebook Google and Microsoft.

Just as the advent of faster global telecommunications links in the late made it possible to outsource and offshore a far greater range of business roles so online crowd labor platforms and an abundance of people with access to broadband and a computer at home will again reshape the world of work said Microsoft Gray.

7. Reclusive California pilot appears to be behind fake news empire. A great read.

Many of the fake stories identified by BuzzFeed News followed the exact same pattern They falsely reported that a big celebrity was moving to a specific town or community.

To try and identify the owner BuzzFeed News followed a trail from the fake sites to a group of websites about topics including nurses and photos of Jennifer Love Hewitt and eventually to a house in the small city of Atascadero California where a man named Justin Smithson resides.

One morning in early March a staffer for venerable website Snopes logged on to the main email account to read the tips and questions that had flowed in overnight.

8. Florida court decides passwords aren’t protected under the Fifth Amendment:

At the center of the case is Aaron Stahl a Florida man who was arrested after a woman allegedly caught him taking upskirt photos of her at a store.

Stahl ran away and escaped when confronted but he was eventually detained after police used the store surveillance footage to identify his car license plate.

A defendant can be compelled to produce material evidence that is incriminating Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in a dissent which was cited by the trial judge in Stahl case.

9. How Amazon’s Mechanical Turk works … I always thought most of this was done overseas, not in the US.

In a paper called Turkopticon Interrupting Worker Invisibility in Amazon Mechanical Turk the authors stated We argued that AMT is predicated on infrastructuring and hiding human labor rendering it a reliable computational resource for technologists.

In one year after AMT launched Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said a human was needed to spot whether a person was in a photo a task that can now be carried out by deep learning neural networks run by the likes of Baidu Facebook Google and Microsoft.

Just as the advent of faster global telecommunications links in the late made it possible to outsource and offshore a far greater range of business roles so online crowd labor platforms and an abundance of people with access to broadband and a computer at home will again reshape the world of work said Microsoft Gray.

10. That’s a lot of data: Google Translate (transformed by AI) serves 500M+ monthly users in need of 140B words per day

The brain can operate in circumstances in which information is poor or missing it can withstand significant damage without total loss of control it can store a huge amount of knowledge in a very efficient way it can isolate distinct patterns but retain the messiness necessary to handle ambiguity.

The Linguistic Turn The hundred or so current members of Brain it often feels less like a department within a colossal corporate hierarchy than it does a club or a scholastic society or an intergalactic cantina came in the intervening years to count among the freest and most widely admired employees in the entire Google organization.

This February research organization the loose division of the company roughly a thousand employees in all dedicated to the and the unclassifiable convened their leads at an offsite retreat at the Westin Francis on Union Square a luxury hotel slightly less splendid than own San Francisco shop a mile or so to the east.