Canada agency: 'Pot' stocks pose risk
Canada's securities watchdogs are warning investors to be wary of publicly traded companies with ambitions to grow and sell medical marijuana.
Investors may be at risk if they buy into small or previously inactive stocks seeking to enter the business after Canada created new rules for the market April 1, Canadian Securities Administrators said Monday in a statement.
"In many of these cases, just the announcement of intent to develop a medical marijuana business has resulted in an immediate rise in a company's stock price," said the securities administrators, an umbrella group for the country's provincial and territorial securities regulators. The Montreal-based agency didn't identify any companies by name.
Investor interest in marijuana stocks has soared as regulatory changes in Canada and parts of the U.S. have opened the door to legal business opportunities. Health Canada, a federal department, has so far licensed 13 companies to cultivate marijuana and market it to patients who have a doctor's prescription.
"Investors should be aware that companies cannot legally conduct a medical marijuana business without a license from Health Canada, and that there is likely significant time and cost required to obtain such a license," the agency said in the statement.
Canada's warning follows investor alerts about marijuana-related stocks from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.
-- Bloomberg News
Greenpeace lost $5.2 million on trade
AMSTERDAM -- Greenpeace has suffered a $5.2 million loss on an ill-timed bet in the currency market by a well-intentioned -- if reckless -- employee in its finance department.
The environmental group, which is based in Amsterdam, said Monday that the employee -- who had bet the euro would not strengthen against other currencies in 2013, when it did -- had acted beyond the limits of his authority.
Greenpeace International fired the employee, whom it did not identify, but said there was no evidence of fraud.
"Every indication is, this was done with the best of intentions but not the best of judgment," said spokesman Mike Townsley in a telephone interview from Mexico.
He said the organization was deeply concerned that the incident would offend its supporters and apologized. Greenpeace does not accept contributions from companies or governments and is funded entirely by individuals.
Responsibility lies partly with the employee and partly with the organization, Townsley said.
The employee was a financial expert whose job included currency trades to protect the organization from fluctuations in the market. Townsley said the employee was fired for ignoring rules, not for the loss itself.
-- The Associated Press
Film studio bets on YouTube channel
LOS ANGELES -- When AwesomenessTV launched as a YouTube channel two years ago, it was a bet by veteran TV and movie producer Brian Robbins on the ability of teen and tween audiences to find videos they love to watch online.
On Monday, Robbins kicked off DreamWorks TV, another YouTube channel that represents one of the first attempts by Hollywood to mesh the polished look of movies with the chaos of content on the Internet.
The channel is aimed at 6- to 11-year-olds and will have a mix of videos featuring characters familiar to DreamWorks Animation audiences -- like Shrek and Po from Kung Fu Panda -- alongside those who haven't yet made it big -- like cardboard cut-out news anchors from The Report Card.
The hope is that kids who come to watch their favorite characters will get interested in new ones that might one day become just as valuable.
Robbins compared his channel to cable TV networks such as MTV and ESPN in the 1970s and '80s. What were once fledgling networks that no one watched have now become multibillion-dollar enterprises that are the bedrocks of major media companies.
"This is really about building the cable channel of tomorrow," Robbins said.
-- The Associated Press
Target: Glitch caused checkout delays
MINNEAPOLIS -- Target Corp. said a glitch in its system caused delays at checkout registers at some of its U.S. stores, but it wasn't caused by a data security issue or a hacker.
Customers across the country took to social media to report long check-out lines Sunday night because of registers not working.
The Star Tribune newspaper reported that Target employees tried to placate waiting shoppers by handing out $3 coupons in some stores that bore an apology for the delays.
The Minneapolis-based discount retailer did not elaborate on the nature of the problem, and it wasn't immediately clear how many stores were affected.
"Target has identified an issue impacting checkout at some of our U.S. stores," the company said in a statement Sunday night. "The glitch is causing delays at some checkouts, but is not in any way related to a security issue."
In an update later Sunday night, the company said it had been able "able to restore our check-out process."
-- The Associated Press
Bank returns $90 million in overbilling
Bank of America Corp., the second-largest U.S. lender, agreed to an $8 million fine and returned almost $90 million to clients of its Merrill Lynch unit who were improperly charged fees over six years.
About 6,800 retirement plans for charities, ministers and public school workers and 41,000 small businesses paid purchase charges for mutual funds when none were required from 2006 to 2011, according to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. While Merrill Lynch discovered the improper charges in 2006, it didn't inform the regulatory authority until 2011, according to settlement papers released Monday.
Bank of America inherited an array of legal and regulatory disputes with takeovers of Merrill Lynch & Co. and Countrywide Financial Corp. during the financial crisis. Chief Executive Officer Brian Moynihan, whose tenure started in 2010, has set aside more than $55 billion for mortgage-related issues alone. Merrill Lynch was acquired by Charlotte, N.C.-based Bank of America in 2009.
The brokerage failed to supervise or properly train its advisers about the lowest-cost mutual fund shares, the regulatory authority said. The firm relied on the advisers to waive mutual fund charges, which they didn't always do, according to the regulatory authority. Bank of America didn't admit or deny the findings by the regulatory authority, the industry's self-policing body.
The firm was ordered to pay $24.4 million in restitution to clients, on top of the $64.8 million it already returned, according to the regulatory authority's statement.
-- Bloomberg News
Business on 06/17/2014