The Traderszone Network

If you’re nervous about buying stock with prices near records, there are options strategies that can reduce your costs.

Be aware of some important additions to your 1099 forms as they begin to arrive from your brokers.

The Swiss franc shock reverberated through currency trading firms around the world on Friday, wiping out many small-scale investors and the brokerages that cater to them and forcing regulators to take a closer look at the sector. Some major banks also lost out when the Swiss National Bank scrapped its three-year-old cap on the franc against the euro (EURCHF=EBS) without warning on Thursday, including Britain’s Barclays (BARC.L) which lost “tens of millions” of dollars, an industry source said.

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The Federal Reserve is still on track for a potential mid-year interest-rate increase, a top Fed official said on Friday, citing strong U.S. economic momentum and a falling unemployment rate.

The deal could help pair Google with the largest U.S. wireless carriers to battle Apple Inc and its new Apple Pay service, TechCrunch wrote. Softcard is jointly owned by AT&T Inc, Verizon Communication Inc’s Verizon Wireless Inc and T-Mobile US Inc.

“Volatility in absence of liquidity” hurt Goldman and other big banks in the quarter, Harvey Schwartz, Goldman’s chief financial officer, said on a call with analysts. Goldman’s revenue from trading fixed-income securities, currencies and commodities (FICC) fell 19 percent, excluding gains from repayment of debt and the sale of most of its European insurance business in 2013. Overall, FICC revenue fell 29 percent to $1.22 billion, mainly due to a weaker performance in mortgages and credit products such as corporate bonds.

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AT&T Inc said it expected to record charges of about $10 billion for the fourth quarter but the non-cash losses would not affect operating results. The biggest U.S. telephone company said it would take …