It’s been quite some time since I remember opening up a Starbucks (SBUX) quarterly report with a smile. Thankfully last week’s fourth-quarter results finally helped me regain some of my faith as a shareholder in the coffee giant. Clearly on a mission to clean house and get his business back in order Howard Schulz led his Starbucks team through major cost-cutting initiatives. The closing of over 800 inefficient and unnecessary US locations has nearly come to a close. Technological advances in daily operations were implemented. And brand loyalty is making a comeback. The focal points of the quarter were ...

In recent times I've lost a lot of enthusiasm for Panera Bread (PNRA). The stale menu deteriorating ingredient quality and presentation skills killed my loyalty as a customer. The lack of focus on operating efficiency turned me off as an investor. Perhaps management has finally stepped foot inside a few locations and actually flipped through a couple pages of the financials (or maybe they just caught wind of some of my critical Panera articles). Either way they’ve recognized that things haven’t been going all that smoothly. For the past few months management has been quickly -- and so far ...

Among the companies whose shares are expected to see active trade in Wednesday’s session are Ashland, Coke Enterprises, DreamWorks, E-Trade, General Dynamics, Hess, Interpublic, Molex, Norfolk Southern, Target, Unisys, Visa and WellPoint.

Starbucks Coffee Co., the Seattle coffee-bar chain, settles a lawsuit it filed against a former executive, charging him with breaching a non-competition condition of his employment contract.

One might think that entrepreneur Scott Shickler has been cloned: He owns a full-scale restaurant in Roswell Georgia a software company and is spinning off a gourmet dessert company (not to mention a raspberry farm with his brother-in-law). Shickler is a parallel entrepreneur -- which differs from a serial entrepreneur who opens divergent businesses with the goal of selling them -- who owns and runs several businesses in varied industries. Most people are consumed by running one business so how can Shickler and others like him juggle several companies simultaneously?Shickler 42 owns the Nirvana Café and Grille an upscale ...