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An interesting situation developed this week in Florida, where Heir Jordan (Michael's son Marcus) cost the University of Central Florida (UCF) its $3 million sponsorship with Adidas. Marcus felt it necessary to wear Nike (NYSE: NKE) basketball shoes, since they were his father's Nike Air Jordans.

Jordan took to the court in an all-white pair of Nike Air Jordans, which differed from the school's normal black-and-white Adidas basketball shoes. Jordan wore ankle braces with the Adidas logo displayed, but this was a cursory move made to placate Adidas. In fact, the move may have been made so he could say that he was wearing Adidas, just not the shoes. Quite honestly, there is a little soap opera surrounding the situation, so let's take a deeper look.

The IPO market has been pretty slow for the past two years due to the effects of a subprime mortgage crisis that turned into a credit crisis that turned into a worldwide financial crisis and recession. Nonetheless, two companies made their debuts Thursday -- one on the NYSE (NYSE: NYX), the other on the NASDAQ -- and they nailed it. Hyatt Hotels (NYSE: H) gave its investors a 12% gain on its first Big Board trading day, and Ancestry.com (NASDAQ: ACOM) switched those digits, jumping 21% in its first day of trading.

Hyatt Hotels overcame two major concerns. The worldwide travel market slump has been tough on hotel companies, and Hyatt has been subject to the same forces as everyone else. Also, investors may have been worried about infighting among the founder's heirs (the Pritzker family), but the double-digit price increase suggests that investors don't foresee Bancroft-style squabbles screwing investors -- or, if you don't like Dow Jones, now a part of News Corp (NASDAQ: NWS), Playboy (NYSE: PLA) makes the same point.

Warren Buffett's (NYSE: BRK.A) decision to buy the 77.4% shares of Burlington Northern Santa Fe (NYSE: BNI) that he did not already own, for $100 each in cash and stock, is like an early holiday present for BNI shareholders.

And first recommended on April 30, 2009 at a price of $67.81, that means BNI shareholders will earn a cool 47% for their April-bought shares. Not bad for a six-month investment. I would say BNI probably was worth 10-15% more, but BNI shareholders will take the immediate pay-off, just the same.

Buffett's move also reflects his stance toward U.S. railroads, a sector I like, too.

As companies try to find ways to cut costs, one popular approach is to leverage software. And an area that is getting lots of traction is supply chain management. Hey, it's worked for companies like Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT), right?

A leader in the supply chain software space is JDA Software (NASDAQ: JDAS). Well, now the company is going to get bigger; that is, it will purchase i2 Technologies (NASDAQ: ITWO) for $396 million. In fact, the deal will make JDA the world's largest player in the supply chain space.

Here's a shocker: India's central bank just bought 200 tons of gold.

India paid $6.7 billion to the International Monetary Fund for the gold, securing the equivalent of 8% of the world's annual production. India's move is a clear signal that Asia is moving away from the U.S. dollar.

India's finance minister said the reason for the purchase was that the economies of Europe and the US had "collapsed."

A double win: I'm Reiterating by Buy rating for New Britain,Conn.-based tool maker Stanley Works (NYSE: SWK) after the company announced Monday it will buy Black & Decker Corp. (NYSE: BDK) for $4.5 billion in an all-stock deal.

Stanley, first recommended on February 10, 2009 at a price of $32.88, sees the deal as $1 accretive to earnings per share within three years.

Meanwhile, shareholders of Black & Decker, first recommended on April 17, 2009 at a price of $33.53, will receive a 22.1% premium to BDK's closing price as of Friday, October 30, 2009 of $47.22, or about $57.65 per share. Hence, if you bought BDK in April, that represents a 71.9% gain for owning the stock about six months. Not bad.

In North America, the big focus for independent exploration and production firms is on natural gas. Yet, there is still a good amount of oil to be tapped (assuming prices remain relatively high).

So this week, Denbury Resources (NYSE: DNR) capitalized on the opportunity by shelling out $3.2 billion for Encore Acquisition (NYSE: EAC). It's not cheap, coming at a 35% premium. Yet, the deal will create a powerhouse in oil exploration and production in North America.

interestingly enough, in a sign that credit markets are loosening up, JPMorgan (NYSE: JPM) has agreed to provide a revolver of $1.25 billion to bridge the deal.

Unless you already have a major foothold in the search engine market – or an amazing, disruptive technology that can make the world take notice – there isn't much point in staying. Competing with Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) is hard enough, even when you're Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) or Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) ... and, apparently, when you're IAC/InterActive Corp (NASDAQ: IACI). Barry Diller is ready to give up Jeeves, but only if asked nicely.

Diller's presence in the search space is Ask.com, ranked #4 behind Google, Yahoo and Microsoft's Bing. With a substantial gap between first and second, fourth barely registers at all. Ask.com has only a 2% U.S. market share, according to Hitwise, more than 60 percentage points behind the industry leader.

Ivanhoe Mines (NYSE: IVN) was broadly lower Wednesday after mining giant Rio Tinto (NYSE: RTP) boosted its stake in the company from 9.9% to 19.7%. Rio Tinto raised its interest in Ivanhoe by purchasing 46.3 million common shares for $388 million. The proceeds will be used to help build and commission Ivanhoe's Oyu Tolgoi project in Mongolia.

Thanks to the capital infusion, Ivanhoe now has roughly $610 million in cash on its balance sheet. However, traders are hardly cheering the news -- perhaps because Rio Tinto snapped up the stock at a bargain price of $8.38 per share, representing a steep discount to Tuesday's closing price of $11.51.

KaChing! KaChing!

It only makes sense to call a company a sound you like to hear. This is exactly what CEO and co-founder Andy Rachleff must have had in mind. His new company -- kaChing, of course -- is backed by Marc Andreesen (a name often associated with that sound) and Jeff Jordan, the CEO of OpenTable (NASDAQ: OPEN), two guys who usually do a solid job of backing winners. But, they've taken on a challenge by backing a company in the financial services industry.

What are dark pools and how do they work? The words "dark" and "pool" are used to identify large pools of stock that are traded "off exchanges," or in private, and are not shown to the general public. There is no transparency.

Years ago, all stock trades were made on listed exchanges. Expert stock traders would "read the tape" and follow the price changes in large blocks of stocks. Whether they were done on an uptick or down tick would give the trader a hint as to whether the trade was done on the buy or sell side. Every trade on the tape had an equal number of shares on the buy and on the sell side, so if the tape showed a trade of 10,000 shares of a stock, it meant that there was a buyer of 10,000 shares matched with a seller of 10,000 shares.

Pan American Silver (NASDAQ: PAAS - option chain) stock is trading lower today after announcing this morning that it has made a formal takeover bid for exploration company Aquiline Resources (TSX: AQI). PAAS will offer Aquiline shareholders 0.2495 of a PAAS common share plus 0.1 of a PAAS common share purchase warrant for each Aquiline common share. If you think this stock won't be rising too far in the coming months, then it could be a good time to look at a bearish hedged play on PAAS.

This morning, PAAS opened at $25.71. So far today the stock has hit a high of $25.75 and a low of $24.35. As of 11:40, PAAS is trading at $24.52, down $1.40 (-5.4%). The chart for PAAS looks bullish.

Lately, it's been hard to keep track of the dealmaking at Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO). But with a huge pile of cash and a need to find growth, the company is going back to its M&A roots -- in a big way.

The latest deal came Tuesday; that is, Cisco agreed to pay $2.9 billion for Starent Networks (NASDAQ: STAR), which develops infrastructure solutions to deliver multimedia on mobile devices. Keep in mind that a couple weeks ago Cisco purchased for $3 billion another multimedia operator, Tandberg (videoconferencing). And back in March, there was the $590 million deal for Pure Digital (which develops flip video cameras).

The next step remains uncertain for what will go down in history as among the worst newspaper acquisitions.

On Friday, the deadline for submitting bids for the Boston Globe, which is owned by The New York Times Company (NYSE: NYT), passed. Two major contenders were expected to write figures on slips of paper and slide them across the proverbial desk: Platinum Equity, a Beverly Hills-based private equity firm and owner of the San Diego Union-Tribune, and Stephen E. Taylor, whose family sold the Globe in 1993.

China has taken its first major step into the U.S. car market as General Motors announced it had finalized a deal to sell off its Hummer truck brand to Chinese auto manufacturer Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery.

Under the deal, GM will continue to make the trucks no later than 2010. While a deal has been reached, it is still going to be up to Chinese regulators to approve the deal and decide if the brand can be profitable and fit into the country's overall national strategy to improve energy efficiency.