Ever think you could lose rewards if you miss a credit card payment? What about if you haven't traveled much in the past two years and didn't earn points by staying at the right hotel?
Many consumers pick their plastic based on the kind of rewards they can receive on a credit card.
"Rewards programs, however, can be highly complex, with detailed, confusing rules about how consumers can actually use their rewards," according to the federal consumer financial watchdog agency.
MONEY QUICK TIPS: Avoid credit card 'gray' charges
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau pointed out on Wednesday that some disclosure issues, including rewards programs, continue to be problematic, even after the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009.
Best Warren Buffett Companies To Buy Right Now: Empire State Realty Trust Inc (ESRT)
Empire State Realty Trust, Inc., incorporated on July 29, 2011, is a self-administered and self-managed real estate investment trust (REIT), which owns, manages, operates, acquires and repositions office and retail properties in Manhattan and the greater New York metropolitan area. The Company operates in two segments: real estate and construction contracting. As of June 30, 2013, the Company owned 12 office properties (including one long-term ground leasehold interest) encompassing approximately 7.7 million rentable square feet of office space, which were approximately 83.5% leased (or 86.2% giving effect to leases signed but not yet commenced as of that date). Seven of these properties are located in the midtown Manhattan market and encompass in the aggregate approximately 5.9 million rentable square feet of office space, including the Empire State Building. Its Manhattan office properties also contain an aggregate of 440,615 rentable square feet of retail space on their ground floor and/or lower levels. Its remaining five office properties are located in Fairfield County, Connecticut and Westchester County, New York, encompassing in the aggregate approximately 1.8 million rentable square feet.
The Company has entitled land at the Stamford Transportation Center in Stamford, Connecticut, adjacent to one of its office properties, that supports the development of an approximately 380,000 rentable square foot office building and garage, which refers to herein as Metro Tower. As of June 30, 2013, its portfolio also included four standalone retail properties located in Manhattan and two standalone retail properties located in the city center of Westport, Connecticut, encompassing 204,452 rentable square feet in the aggregate. As of June 30, 2013, its standalone retail properties were 100% leased in the aggregate. In addition, the Company has an option to acquire from affiliates of its predecessor two additional Manhattan office properties encompassing approximately 1.5 million rentable squar! e feet of office space and 153,209 rentable square feet of retail space at the base of the buildings.
The Empire State Building is the Company�� flagship property. The 102-story building consists of 2,701,938 rentable square feet of office space and 167,788 rentable square feet of retail space. The building also includes its observatory and broadcasting operations. The Company�� portfolio includes retail properties located in retail corridors in Manhattan and Westport, Connecticut. Tenants at 10 Union Square in Manhattan include Best Buy Mobile, Starbucks, A&P, Panera Bread, FedEx/Kinko��, Au Bon Pain, Chipotle Mexican Grill, and GameStop. In the greater New York metropolitan area, its portfolio includes high quality suburban office properties in densely populated metropolitan communities in Fairfield County, Connecticut and Westchester County, New York. tenants of the greater New York metropolitan area flagship Metro Center (at the Transportation Center in Stamford, Connecticut) include Thomson Reuters, Jefferies Group, Columbus Circle Investors, Torm Shipping, Olympus Partners, BP Energy, Tweedy, Browne Company and Susquehanna International.
The Company approximately has 242 million square feet of rentable space, which are contained within Midtown�� multi-tenant office buildings. Downtown Chicago and the Washington, D.C. CBD combine has a total of 230 million square feet of office space. Three-quarters 75.3% of Midtown�� office stock is classified as Class A with total square footage of 182 million square feet. The Company approximately has 43.9 million square feet of Midtown office space is counted as Class B stock, accounting for 18.2% of the total market. The remaining 6.5% of Midtown office space (15.8 million square feet) is categorized as Class C space. The Grand Central submarket is a office submarket in Midtown Manhattan with 44 million square feet and is located on the east side of Midtown Manhattan, to the north of Murray Hill and to the south of the Park ! Avenue co! rridor.
The West Side office submarket, located to the south and west of Central Park and including the area around Columbus Circle, consists of 25.8 million square feet of office space. Westchester County contains approximately 28.9 million square feet of office space and is split into six submarkets: White Plains CBD and non-CBD, Northern, Central, Eastern and Southern. The White Plains CBD is situated in south central Westchester County, along the Cross-Westchester Expressway (Interstate 287) corridor between the Sprain Brook Parkway and the Hutchinson River Parkway. The submarket consists of approximately 6.3 million square feet of office space and is defined to include the area south of Barker Avenue, north of Quinby Avenue, east of the Bronx River Parkway and west of South Broadway/Post Road. Westchester�� Eastern office submarket consists of 6.5 million square feet of space and is located to the east of White Plains, between New Rochelle and the Connecticut state border.
Advisors' Opinion:- [By Jonas Elmerraji]
We're seeing a similar setup in shares of Empire State Realty Trust (ESRT), the $1.5 billion commercial landlord that counts Manhattan's Empire State Building among its 7.7 million leasable square feet of office space. ESRT is a relative newcomer to the public markets, trading for the first time back in October.
But just like PEB, Empire State is forming an ascending triangle setup -- in this case, with the resistance level to watch at $15.50. In fact, that $15.50 level has acted like a ceiling for shares five times now since last December; each of those times, shares have gotten swatted lower. That means that a breakout above $15.50 is a materially significant buy trigger.
When $15.50 does get taken out, I'd recommend keeping a protective stop at the 50-day moving average. That level has been a good proxy for ESRT's support line over the course of the whole pattern.
- [By Reuters]
John Moore/Getty Images NEW YORK -- Investors in the Empire State Building have filed a lawsuit accusing the real estate magnates who took it public of short-changing them $300 million by refusing to sell the iconic skyscraper at a premium price. According to a complaint filed Tuesday in a New York state court in Manhattan, Peter Malkin and his son Anthony put their own interests ahead of the building's investors by spurning all-cash offers of as much as $2.3 billion for the building and $1.4 billion for Empire State Building Associates, which held the title and master lease. Instead, the Malkins put the landmark building and 17 other properties into Empire State Realty Trust Inc., whose Oct. 1 IPO valued the property at just $1.89 billion and ESBA at just $1.1 billion, according to the complaint. The lawsuit by plaintiff Marc Postelnek seeks class-action status on behalf of more than 2,800 investors who hold shares in ESBA, which was created in 1961 and was supervised by a Malkin company, Malkin Holdings. It claimed the Malkins acted in bad faith by aborting a "bidding war" for the building, and instead enriched themselves by hundreds of millions of dollars through an IPO. "Given their positions of control and authority over the fate of the Empire State Building, the Malkins had a duty to act in the best interests of their investors," the plaintiffs' lawyer, John Rizio-Hamilton, a partner at Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann, representing Postelnek, told Reuters. "By failing to properly consider offers to maximize the building's value, the Malkins breached that duty." The lawsuit seeks to recover profit that building investors allegedly lost because of the Malkins' refusal to sell. Empire State Realty Trust, a real estate investment trust, is a successor to Malkin Holdings. "These claims are wholly without merit and we will respond to them in court," a spokeswoman for the REIT said Thursday. ESBA had been created by Lawrence Wien, the father
5 Best Financial Stocks To Invest In Right Now: Nuveen Municipal Value Fund Inc.(NUV)
Nuveen Municipal Value Fund, Inc. is a closed-ended fixed income mutual fund launched by Nuveen Investments, Inc. The fund is managed by Nuveen Asset Management. It invests in the fixed income markets of the United States. The fund also invests some portion of its portfolio in derivative instruments. It invests in undervalued municipal securities and other related investments the income, exempt from regular federal income taxes that are rated Baa or BBB or better. It employs fundamental analysis with bottom-up stock picking approach to create its portfolio. The fund benchmarks the performance of its portfolio against the Standard & Poor?s (S&P) National Municipal Bond Index. Nuveen Municipal Value Fund, Inc. was formed on April 8, 1987 and is domiciled in the United States.
Advisors' Opinion:- [By Adam Aloisi]
The following chart takes a comparative look at some widely held ETFs/CEFs holding different types of bonds. The objective is to visualize not only how much these products cost, but also to break down the percent of total yield depleted by management fees. I define total yield as current annualized yield plus net fees - in other words the yield of the fund if there were no management fees attached. The funds we will examine are aforementioned BND, iShares 20+ Treasury Bond (TLT), iShares High-Yield Corporate (HYG), Nuveen Municipal Value (NUV), Eaton Vance Limited Duration (EVV) and Alliance Bernstein Global High-Yield (AWF).
- [By Aaron Levitt]
Everyone hates paying taxes. So when investors have the ability to get a 7.3% taxable-equivalent yield, they should jump at the opportunity. As one of the largest and oldest municipal CEFs, the Nuveen Municipal Value Fund (NUV) makes it possible.
- [By Donald van Deventer]
The latest implied forward rate forecast from Kamakura Corporation shows projected 10-year U.S. Treasury yields differing -0.07% to 0.03% from last week while fixed rate mortgage yields varied by -0.01% to 0.08%. Mortgage yields, determined by the Monday through Wednesday weekly survey of the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, lag Treasury movements simply because of the 3-day yield calculation used in the Primary Mortgage Market Survey. The 10-year U.S. Treasury yield is projected to rise from 2.92% at Thursday's close (down 0.06% from last week) to 3.374% (down 0.06% from last week) in one year. The 10-year U.S. Treasury yield in ten years is forecast to reach 4.639%, 1 basis point lower than last week. The 15-year fixed rate mortgage rate is forecast to rise from the effective yield of 3.69% on Thursday (down 0.001% from last week) to 4.222% (down 0.006% from last week) in one year and 6.29% in 10 years, up 0.038% from last week. We explain the background for these calculations in the rest of this note, along with some mortgage servicing rights metrics. The forecast allows investors in exchange traded U.S. Treasury funds (TLT) (TBT), total return bond funds (BOND), municipal bonds (NUV) and exchange traded mortgage funds (REM) to assess likely total returns over the next 120 months. Treasury-related exchange traded funds affected by the forward rates include:
5 Best Financial Stocks To Invest In Right Now: Barclays PLC (BARC)
Barclays PLC (Barclays) is a global financial services provider engaged in retail banking, credit cards, wholesale banking, investment banking, wealth management and investment management services. The Company�� operations include its overseas offices, subsidiaries and associates. The Company operates in eight segments: UK Retail and Business Banking (UK RBB), Europe Retail and Business Banking (Europe RBB), Africa Retail and Business Banking (Africa RBB), Barclaycard, Barclays Investment Bank, Barclays Corporate Banking, Wealth and Investment Management, and Head Office and Other Operations. Advisors' Opinion:- [By Corinne Gretler]
A gauge of lenders climbed, with National Bank of Greece SA rallying 24 percent and Barclays Plc (BARC) advancing 6.9 percent. Man Group Plc, the world�� largest publicly traded hedge-fund manager, surged the most in four years as regulators cut the amount of capital it must hold. Volkswagen AG and Pirelli & C. SpA slid more than 4 percent as auto-industry shares declined.
- [By Sofia Horta e Costa]
Barclays Plc (BARC) fell to a one-month low as Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp. sold a stake in the lender. Fiat SpA lost 6.5 percent as Chrysler Group LLC went in for a vehicle recall. France Telecom SA (FTE) rose after its Orange Business Services unit won a five-year deal to deploy a private network for Heineken NV. Johnson Matthey Plc (JMAT) jumped to its highest price in at least 23 years after posting full-year profit that beat estimates.
- [By Sarah Jones]
Barclays Plc (BARC) led a selloff by U.K. lenders as Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group Inc. sold half of its stake in the bank. EasyJet Plc (EZJ) lost 4.1 percent as the carrier reported passenger numbers for May. Johnson Matthey Plc (JMAT) rallied 6.3 percent after posting pretax profit that beat analysts��estimates.
- [By Cordell Eddings]
Treasuries are rising along with stocks as economists say the Fed will keep suppressing borrowing costs to support the world�� largest economy after a 16-day government shutdown slowed growth. While government debt was a haven as the U.S. endured the worst recession in seven decades, primary dealers such as Barclays Plc (BARC) and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. say the gains this month show that the Fed�� $85 billion of monthly bond purchases are masking the risk of owning fixed-income securities as the recovery in America takes hold.
5 Best Financial Stocks To Invest In Right Now: Parnassos Enterprises SA (PARN)
Parnassos Enterprises SA is a Greece-based holding company. The Company mainly operates through its subsidiary Seirios SA, which offers traveler services on the Athens - Lamia highway. Seirios SA owns a building complex with a total area of 16,720 square meters and it operates two petrol stations, a trading and repairing tire center, two road assistance buildings, two car washing stations, a laundry-lubricator station for tracks, snack bars, restaurants, and coffee shops. It also operates two more petrol stations on the Athens - Lamia highway in the Olympus Plazza block of buildings, which also operates two car washer and two track washer stations. The Company also owns, through Seirios SA, the subsidiary Alsity SA, a company which is engaged in the design, construction, development and operation of the Olympic Sailing Centre in Agios Kosmas, Greece. Advisors' Opinion:- [By John Udovich]
Biotech news this week was dominated by a number of healthcare and biotech related IPOs, including Parnell Pharmaceuticals Holdings Ltd (NASDAQ: PARN), Signal Genetics Inc (NASDAQ: SGNL), ZS Pharma Inc (NASDAQ: ZSPH), Ardelyx Inc (NASDAQ: ARDX)�and Zafgen Inc (NASDAQ: ZFGN) with Kite Pharma Inc (NASDAQ: KITE), Microlin Bio Inc (NASDAQ: MCLB) and�Syndax Pharmaceuticals Inc (NASDAQ: SNDX) presumably set to debut today (Note:�See�This Week�� Biotech IPOs: Two Losers and One Winner So Far (PARN, SGNL & ZSPH)):
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