The Market In 5 Minutes: Oil's Strong Open, Cohen's Comeback, And A Look Back At 2017's Best And Worst Stocks

IN THE NEWS

The S&P 500 delivered one of its best years in recent history in 2017, finishing the year up 19.8 percent. Most U.S. investors had a lot of winners in their portfolios this year, but some stocks certainly performed better than others: Link

Here’s a look at the 10 worst-performing stocks in the entire S&P 500 in 2017: Link

Conventional wisdom says that insiders and 10 percent owners really only buy shares of a company for one reason -- they believe the stock price will rise and they want to profit from it. So insider buying can be an encouraging signal for potential investors, particularly in an overpriced market or after disappointing news: Link

More than a decade before federal agents arrived at Caterpillar Inc. CAT in March with search warrants, an anonymous employee claimed in a letter to its chief executive that something was wrong about how the heavy-machinery maker used a subsidiary in Switzerland to shrink its tax bill: Link $

In U.S. cities with the tightest labor markets, workers are finding something that’s long been missing from the broader economic expansion: faster-growing paychecks: Link $

Oil prices posted their strongest opening to a year since 2014 on Tuesday, with crude rising to mid-2015 highs amid large anti-government rallies in Iran and ongoing supply cuts led by OPEC and Russia: Link

Britain may impose new taxes on tech giants like Google GOOG and Facebook FB unless they do more to combat online extremism by taking down material aimed at radicalizing people or helping them to prepare attacks, the country’s security minister said: Link

Behind Steve Cohen’s hedge fund comeback is Big Brother: Link

Bitcoin is losing its luster with some of its earliest and most avid fans -- criminals -- giving rise to a new breed of virtual currency: Link

Companies that make packaging from plants instead of fossil fuels are starting to challenge the oil industry’s ambition to increase the supply of raw materials for plastics: Link

While the opioid epidemic ravages rural America, Wall Street is not immune to its scourge: Link

ECONOMIC DATA

• The manufacturing PMI for December is schedule for release at 9:45 a.m. ET.
• The Treasury is set to auction 3-and 6-month bills at 11:30 a.m. ET.
• The Treasury will auction 4-and 52-week bills at 1:00 p.m. ET.

ANALYST RATINGS

• Jefferies upgraded Genesco GCO from Hold to Buy
• RBC upgraded Incyte INCY from Sector Perform to Outperform
• JPMorgan upgraded Stryker SYK from Neutral to Overweight
• KBW downgraded Allstate ALL from Market Perform to Underperform
• JPMorgan downgraded Johnson & Johnson JNJ from Overweight to Neutral
• Jefferies downgraded Planet Fitness PLNT from Buy to Hold

This is a tool used by the Benzinga News Desk each trading day — it's a look at everything happening in the market, in five minutes. To get the full version of this note every morning, click here.