Billionaire investor Carl Icahn has bought a 9.3 percent stake in the Burlington speech recognition company Nuance Communications Inc., according to a regulatory filing from the company. A monthly confidence index that seeks to gauge the mood of local employers posted a 50.1 reading in March, up 1.1 points from the February reading but down 4.7 points from the March 2012 reading, the Associated Industries of Massachusetts said Tuesday. Rockland Trust, a Rockland-based commercial bank with $5.8 billion in assets, said Tuesday that it provided $8 million in financing for the recently completed Arboretum Place in Boston's Jamaica Plain neighborhood. Taris Biomedical, a Lexington-based pharmaceutical company focused on developing new treatments for bladder diseases, announced Tuesday that it has raised an additional $12.5 million in financing. Foreclosure activity in Massachusetts declined in February as a result of an improving economic conditions and a revitalized real estate market, the Warren Group said Tuesday. Investor sentiment reached its highest level of the past three years during the first quarter of 2013, said Boston-based John Hancock, which has been maintaining a quarterly investor confidence index since 2011. As concern over many national issues declined, the index posted a first-quarter reading of 24, up from a fourth-quarter 2012 reading of 18. Compared with the last three months of 2012, a significantly larger share of investors think that now is a good time to invest in stocks (58 percent versus 48 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012), John Hancock said. “We are seeing a remarkable shift in sentiment on the part of investors,” Bill Cheney, John Hancock’s chief economist, said. Predictive Biosciences announced a partnership with ARUP Laboratories that will offer the company's molecular diagnostic bladder cancer tests to ARUP's national network of clients. Lexington-based Predictive Biosciences specializes in molecular diagnostic cancer assays and provides molecular pathology services for urologists. | | |
No comments:
Post a Comment