Mergers & Acquisitions, 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.

Avon says it's considering a sweetened buyout offer of almost $10.7 billion from Coty Inc. Avon says that it expects to respond to the new offer within a week.

AT&T is in talks to sell a majority stake in its Yellow Pages business to Cerberus, in a deal that would value the business at as much as $1.5 billion. TPG has also held talks about buying the business.

Capital One Financial completed its $6.3 billion acquisition of ING Direct USA from ING Groep.

Yahoo Inc and its Asian partners, China's Alibaba and Japan's Softbank Corp, have called off talks over a tax-free sale of the U.S. company's Asian assets, a source familiar with the situation told Reuters.

Bringing Hollywood's two biggest independent film studios and the blockbuster young adult franchises "Twilight" and "The Hunger Games" into one powerful entity, Lions Gate Entertainment has agreed to acquire Summit Entertainment for $412.5 million in cash and stock.

Lions Gate Entertainment is close to an agreement to acquire Summit Entertainment, the studio behind the "Twilight" movies, in a deal expected to close as early as this week, according to people familiar with the matter.

Nasdaq OMX has stepped up its opposition to the planned merger between NYSE Euronext and Deutsche Börse and said the deal would "irrevocably destroy" competition in Europe's listed-derivatives markets, just as the European Commission nears a decision on the tie-up.