The end of the NFL regular season brings two major topics: playoffs and awards. Charles Robinson is joined by Yahoo’s Shalise Manza Young to kick off the mid-week podcast discussing the MVP award and recent comments made by Chicago based reporter Hub Arkush that he would not be voting for Aaron Rodgers to take home his second consecutive trophy. Moving onto the playoffs, Charles breaks down where the playoff seeding stands with just one more weekend to go and why the NFC has gone from… Source link

Antonio Brown released a statement on Wednesday blaming his “coach” for his midgame exit from the field on Sunday that preceded his still-pending release from the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.  The statement released through his lawyer Sean Burstyn was the first time Brown has directly addressed the incident in public. He doesn’t reference Bruce Arians by name, but makes multiple references to an interaction with his “coach,” whom he says pressured him to play with an injured ankle during Sunday’s… Source link

Stock futures slipped Wednesday evening heading into overnight trading after equities did an about-face in the earlier session, plummeting from record highs as investors mulled the likelihood of tighter Federal Reserve policy and interest rate hikes as soon as March. Contracts on all three major indexes were down to extend a bearish day, spurred by the release of minutes from the Federal Open Market Committee’s (FOMC) meeting December 15 that flagged concerns from policymakers about worsening… Source link

With markets still concerned with inflation and how the Fed may react in regard to rate hikes, investors are gearing up for an uncertain 2022.  And according to Francis Gannon, co-chief investment officer at Royce Investment Partners, small caps may be the place to weather these uncertainties in the new year. “I think part of the opportunity here with small caps is the fact that they haven’t done as well as some of the other asset classes,” Gannon said on Yahoo Finance Live (video above)…. Source link

Block (SQ) shares hit 52-week lows on Wednesday, closing down more than 8%. The stock slid as part of a recent sell-off in growth names and risky assets amid concerns of Fed rate hikes.  The digital payment firm, formally known as Square, is down about 26% since announcing its corporate entity name change to Block, on Dec. 1 of last year.  The switch was seen as a nod to the company’s increasing focus on blockchain, the technology which underpins cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin ( Source link

Roku (ROKU) shares dropped more than 11.7% on Wednesday amid an Underweight initiation by Atlantic Equities over concerns of slowing growth and weak penetration in markets abroad.   “We estimate that 80% of Roku’s active accounts are located in the U.S., implying 34% penetration in that market and just 6% in the other markets in which it operates,” analyst Hamilton Faber wrote in a note to investors. The streaming device company’s international markets include Canada, Mexico, Brazil, the… Source link

This article was first featured in Yahoo Finance Tech, a weekly newsletter highlighting our original content on the industry. Get it sent directly to your inbox every Wednesday by 4 p.m. ET. Subscribe Wednesday, January 5, 2022 Apple will need to enter uncharted territory to reach $4 trillion Apple (AAPL) on Monday made history by becoming the first publicly traded company with a market cap of $3 trillion. It’s now seesawing back and forth between the mark for the thrill of it. It’s a… Source link

Alphabet-owned Google is planning to give hefty raises and stock awards to four of its top executives — just weeks after the tech giant informed employees they should not expect to receive inflation-based pay raises. The four executives — Google CFO Ruth Porat, senior vice president Prabhakar Raghavan, chief business officer Philipp Schindler and chief legal officer Kent Walker — will receive base salaries of $1 million in 2022, up from $650,000, according… Source link

Google unveiled at CES on Wednesday a range of new ways to keep its Android devices connected, and that includes cars. As more vehicles go electric and automakers evolve into software developers, we can only expect to see more plays directed at turning cars into connected devices. One exemplar of this phenomenon is Volvo Cars, which will launch a direct integration with the Google Home ecosystem in the coming months, both Volvo and Google announced on Wednesday…. Source link

Google is announcing no fewer than 13 different new software features at CES 2022, ranging from AirPods-like fast switching to promised software that will mirror your Android text apps on a Chromebook. It’s part of an initiative that Google calls “Better Together” but that the rest of the industry is more likely to refer to as “catching up to Apple’s ecosystem.” The biggest updates come to Google’s “Fast Pair” framework, an Android UI designed to make pairing Bluetooth… Source link