Bloomberg Oil’s bull run is grinding to a halt. Hedge funds lowered their bets on Brent crude after they rose to a record a week earlier. And the net-bullish position on West Texas Intermediate, which hit a nine-month high last month, dwindled for a third straight week. The message: After a months-long build-up, investors are wavering, concerned US crude will ...

Bloomberg Apple Inc. looks like it’s having a not-so Merry Christmas. Analysts have lowered iPhone X shipment projections for the first quarter of next year, citing signs of lackluster demand at the end of the holiday shopping season. Sinolink Securities Co. analyst Zhang Bin said in a report that handset shipments in the period may be as low as 35 ...

Bloomberg ADT Inc., the security company backed by Apollo Global Management LLC, filed for a US initial public offering. The company filed with an initial offering size of $100 million, a placeholder that’s typically used to calculate fees and will likely change, according to a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. ADT intends to use the proceeds to ...

Bloomberg A picture of inflation-squeezed consumers and Brexit-wary companies emerged in the UK’s latest overview of its economy. Annual growth in the third quarter slowed to 1.7 percent, slightly higher than previously estimated but still the weakest pace in 4 1/2 years, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said. The economy expanded an unrevised 0.4 percent from the second quarter, ...

Bloomberg For millions of Americans suffering from debilitating nerve pain, a once-overlooked option has emerged as an alternative to high doses of opioids: implanted medical devices using electricity to counteract pain signals the same way noise-cancelling headphones work against sound. The approach, called neuromodulation, has been a godsend for Linda Landy, who was a 42-year-old runner when a foot surgery ...

Bloomberg President Vladimir Putin is using the threat of additional US sanctions to encourage wealthy Russians to repatriate some of their overseas assets, which exceed $1 trillion by one estimate. Putin told lawmakers that a new capital amnesty program was needed “given the foreign restrictions, which instead of lessening are now worsening,” according to a transcript posted on the Kremlin’s ...

Bloomberg Syrian rebel groups rejected Russia’s planned Sochi conference on Syria, saying Moscow was seeking to bypass a UN-based Geneva peace process and blam- ing Russia for committing war crimes in the wartorn country. In a statement by around 40 rebel groups who include some of the military factions who participated in earlier rounds of Geneva peace talks, they said ...

Bloomberg China hosted top diplomats from Afghanistan and Pakistan on Tuesday in a bid to mediate a long-simmering conflict between the neighboring countries. Afghan Foreign Minister Salahuddin Rabbani and Pakistan Foreign Minister Khawaja Asif joined their Chinese counterpart Wang Yi on Tuesday to discuss possible economic and security cooperation. The first trilateral minister-level dialogue in Beijing comes as China expands ...

Bloomberg Almost a year into Donald Trump’s presidency, the border wall he passionately promoted throughout his election campaign amounts to eight prototypes, no more than 30 feet long each, sitting in a desert outside San Diego. No funding has been appropriated by Congress to advance the project beyond the testing phase. There’s no final design. And despite Trump’s rallying cry ...

Bloomberg South Africa’s ruling African National Congress agreed to seek a change in the constitution to allow for the expropriation of land without compensation, provided it doesn’t affect the economy and food production. The party agreed to the proposal in a debate that “nearly collapsed” its five yearly conference, Enoch Godongwana, the head of the ANC’s economic transformation committee, told ...