Catch up on the weekend’s top five stories with this list compiled by The Fly: 1. Meredith (MDP) announced that it has entered into a binding agreement to acquire all outstanding shares of Time Inc. (TIME) for $18.50 per share in an all-cash transaction valued at $2.8B. The transaction has been unanimously approved by the Boards of Directors of Meredith and Time Inc., and is expected to close during the first quarter of calendar 2018. 2. Thanksgiving and Black Friday online sales in the U.S. surged to record highs as shoppers bought more on their mobile devices, according to Reuters, citing retail analytics firms. U.S. retailers raked in a record $7.9B in online sales on Black Friday and Thanksgiving, up 17.9% from a year ago, Adobe Analytics (ADBE) said. Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal reported that the number of people visiting U.S. stores on Thanksgiving and Black Friday fell 4% from last year, according to RetailNext. Among big online retailers are Amazon (AMZN), Wal-Mart (WMT) and eBay (EBAY). 3. A long price war in wireless is easing, which has left Verizon’s (VZ) shares looking cheap, Jack Hough wrote in this week’s edition of Barron’s. They could return 20%, including a dividend yield of 5%, over the next year, he added. 4. Pixar’s “Coco” is the latest movie from the Disney (DIS) animated empire to win the annual Thanksgiving box-office, posting a five-day debut of $71.2M from almost four thousand theaters. The movie, about the popular Mexican holiday Dia de Los Muertos, received an A+ CinemaScore and 96% from Rotten Tomatoes. Overseas, the animated film took in another $30.7M from 22 markets for an early foreign tally of $82.2M and $153.4M globally. 5. Vulcan Materials (VMC), Fluor (FLR), Martin Marietta Materials (MLM), Aecom (ACM), Jacobs Engineering Group (JEC), Granite Construction (GVA), Eagle Materials (EXP), U.S. Concrete (USCR), Caterpillar (CAT), Mosaic (MOS), Agrium (AGU), Mondelez (MDLZ), and Tencent (TCEHY) saw positive mentions in Barron’s, while Cboe Global Markets (CBOE), CME Group (CME), and HP Enterprise (HPE) were mentioned cautiously.
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