Acquisition | featured news

...Today, as individual investors buy and sell common stocks less and less, the transaction symbolizes the rapidly advancing utilization of vehicles that are too esoteric for the general public to comprehend– futures contracts and options on the direction of interest rates, or oil and natural gas prices, or metals and agricultural products like wheat and corn, or precious metals like gold and silver, and especially credit instruments like mortgages and bank loans.

The New York Stock Exchange is being sold to a little-known rival in Atlanta for about $8 billion, ending more than two centuries of independence for the iconic Big Board. The buyer, IntercontinentalExchange, a 12-year-old exchange that deals in investing contracts known as futures, said Thursday that little would change for the trading floor in Manhattan's financial district.

General Electric is on the verge of finalizing a deal to buy Italian aerospace group Avio for as much as €3 billion ($4 billion), according to people familiar with the negotiations.

Mining company Freeport-McMoRan is buying a pair of oil and gas producers for $9 billion, creating a natural resources conglomerate with assets ranging from oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico to a huge copper mine in Indonesia....

For Leo Apotheker, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO, a July 2011 meeting with Autonomy founder Mike Lynch at a chic seaside resort in France was pivotal to his effort to remake a storied technology giant.

Hewlett Packard Co rebuffed a request by former Autonomy Chief Executive Mike Lynch to detail accusations of accounting fraud leveled against the British software company and its former executives, and challenged Lynch to submit to questions under penalty of perjury.

Zillow has agreed to acquire rental and real estate search startup HotPads for $16 million in cash. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter. The deal is the online real estate company’s first acquisition of a consumer-facing and its sixth acquisition overall in the past two years.

Hewlett-Packard Co was sued on Monday by an investor who claimed the company knew statements about its Autonomy acquisition were misleading and led the stock to fall, according to lawyers representing the plaintiff.

Hewlett-Packard Co. said that a British company it bought for $9.7 billion last year lied about its finances, resulting in a massive write-down of the value of the business. CEO Meg Whitman avoided calling it a fraud, but said Tuesday that there were "serious accounting improprieties, disclosure failures and outright misrepresentations at Autonomy Corporation PLC."

Jefferies will continue to operate as a full-service global investment banking firm in its current form, the companies said.