Insights

Flight Centre managing director Graham Turner said the travel agency was considering an appeal after the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission won price-fixing claims against the company on Friday.

The Goodman Group has boosted its asset base with the $343 million purchase of the 14.4 hectare Sydney Corporate Park in Alexandria from Rathdrum Properties, run by the Hannan family.

The well-fed passengers on the financial services gravy train have sprung from their premiere classe seats with burning indignation. They are shaking their fists and crying foul. They accuse your humble essayist of professional misconduct and deceit, of prejudice and poor research!

Retailers hoping for a merry Christmas are betting smartphone and tablet technology will do the trick, writes Eli Greenblat.

Shareholders in Washington H. Soul Pattinson were told their dividends could be threatened by the company being forced to sell assets if a restructuring proposal put forward by dissident shareholders Perpetual and M.H. Carnegie wins support.

The Minerals Council boss has steered the organisation through some rough waters, writes Peter Ker.

If it hadn't been for the brand-loyal rendezvous, we wouldn't have seen Mrs Watson's Bay at Lizard Island, dived in her underwater clam gardens and wrestled with the giant black marlin on No. 10 Ribbon Reef. Nor would we have ventured from the Gold Coast to Grafton by sea for the annual Jacaranda Festival or cruised on the windjammer James Craig off Broken Bay in pirate costume, as whales breached and we all turned a shade of green.

Expect to be pale, overweight and sick, but then you turn a corner, writes Nina Hendy.

New for old lifejackets

Flight Centre managing director Graham Turner said the travel agency was considering an appeal after the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission won price-fixing claims against the company in court.

Nine Entertainment is undoubtedly the sexiest business brand to join the stock exchange lists this year, but its appeal in terms of profit growth is a different matter.

It wasn't quite a champagne launch but the bubbly still flowed at the sharemarket debut of Nine Entertainment as current affairs star Liz Hayes rang the bell on a new era of public ownership for the TV network.

The dollar is trading off its three-month lows but remains in a holding pattern, as financial markets look towards US jobs data for guidance on when the Federal Reserve could start to reduce its bond purchases.

Qantas faces a sharp rise in its borrowing costs after it suffered the ignominy of a downgrade in its all-important credit rating to junk status from investment grade.

Supermarket chains Woolworths and Coles will walk away from decades of deep fuel discounts, capping their popular shopper dockets at 4¢ a litre, to avoid a possibly bruising court battle with the competition regulator which it believed it would have won.

Contrition time. At the end of August when Qantas announced an underlying pre-tax loss of $31 million in the June half but an increase in pre-tax earnings for the year from $95 million to $192 million, I wrote that a 14 per cent jump in the airline's shares price to $1.40 on the day was justified.