On The Fly: Top five weekend stock stories

Catch up on the weekend's top five stories with this list compiled by The Fly: 1. Carl Icahn and Darwin Deason, Xerox's (XRX) first- and third-biggest investors, have formed an alliance and are planning to encourage the company to explore a potential sale, according to The Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the matter. 2. Amazon (AMZN) will open its checkout-free grocery store to the public on Monday after over a year of testing, according to Reuters. The Seattle store, which is known as Amazon Go, relies on cameras and sensors to track what shoppers remove from shelves, the report noted. 3. Especially for tech companies, tax cuts will boost dividends, buybacks, and mergers and acquisitions, but tech usually has a hard time putting vast amounts of cash to work as it requires little R&D to produce huge amounts of revenue, Tiernan Ray wrote in this week's edition of Barron's. For example, Apple (AAPL) does not have many places to invest that will demonstrably boost financial results, he noted. However, without the excuse that the cash is stuck overseas, pressure may grow for Apple to do something big, with Netflix (NFLX) as the most likely candidate for a purchase, the report added. 4. Once again, Sony's (SNE) "Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle" stayed atop the box office in its fifth weekend, with an estimated $20M from 3,704 theaters. The movie cleared the $300M mark domestically and has become the fifth-biggest Sony title of all time. The Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart-led remake has received an A- CinemaScore and got a 77% from Rotten Tomatoes. 5. Boeing (BA) and Walmart (WMT) saw positive mentions in Barron's.