Month: September 2020

Joshua Harris, Apollo Global Management Co-Founder speaks during the 2020 Delivering Alpha conference on Sept. 30th, 2020.CNBCA notable private equity investor said Wednesday that the boom in special purpose acquisition companies was not just a passing fad.Apollo Global Management co-founder Joshua Harris said at the Delivering Alpha conference presented by CNBC and Institutional Investor that SPACs were filling a needed role for companies that were closing in on going public. Apollo has both raised its own SPACs and exited its position in companies through the blank check vehicles, Harris said."The SPAC part of the IPO market is a part of the market that's here to stay," Harris told CNBC's Leslie Picker.There has been a rush of SPACs in recent months, outpacing traditional IPOs in money ...

An indoor farming start-up that heralds itself as the future of agriculture and has Martha Stewart on its board announced Tuesday it is going public through a reverse merger, the latest in a series of blank-check deals during the coronavirus pandemic.  Kentucky-based AppHarvest is merging with special purpose acquisition company Novus Capital Corp., while picking up $475 million in financing, $375 million of which is coming through a PIPE, or private investment in public equity.Shares of Novus Capital were rising more than 15% on Tuesday after the deal was publicized. The transaction is set to close in the late fourth quarter of this year or early in 2021, according to a release. AppHarvest operates a 60-acre facility in Morehead, Kentucky, that it says is one of the world's largest high-

After Hadi Yousef began to invest in stocks, he soon learned the value of listening to a company's earnings call. It didn't take long for the then-Indiana University student to realize that tracking them down for a range of companies was a challenge. "Around that time, five years ago, I had really gotten into podcasts, and so that was our goal: to make listening to earnings calls as easy as listening to podcasts," Yousef said Monday on CNBC's "The Exchange." So Yousef created the aptly named app Earnings Calls, which compiles audio recordings of quarterly earnings calls for more than 2,100 publicly traded companies. The app has more than 10,000 active users.Both numbers are growing. Yousef, 26, said the app is actively taking requests for new companies to include, and new users are adding

A Deutsche Bank AG flag flies outside the company's office on Wall Street in New York.Mark Kauzlarich | Bloomberg | Getty ImagesFinancial stocks came under pressure on Monday amid a report that global banks moved allegedly illicit funds over the past two decades despite warnings from U.S. officials.Shares of Deutsche Bank dropped more than 8%, while JPMorgan fell 3.1%. Goldman Sachs fell 0.4%, Citigroup lost 2% and Bank of New York Mellon traded 4.1% lower. The sell-off was triggered by a new investigation by BuzzFeed and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists that said the banks' internal compliance officers flagged a total of more than $2 trillion in transactions between 1999 and 2017 as possible money laundering or other criminal activity. The report cited confidenti