Opening Bell: 10.30.18

Exclusive: Trump to terminate birthright citizenship [Axios]
President Trump plans to sign an executive order that would remove the right to citizenship for babies of non-citizens and unauthorized immigrants born on U.S. soil, he said yesterday in an exclusive interview for "Axios on HBO," a new four-part documentary news series debuting on HBO this Sunday at 6:30 p.m. ET/PT.
Why it matters: This would be the most dramatic move yet in Trump's hardline immigration campaign, this time targeting "anchor babies" and "chain migration." And it will set off another stand-off with the courts, as Trump’s power to do this through executive action is debatable to say the least.

GE Slashes Dividend, Revamps Power as New CEO Begins Turnaround [Bloomberg]
General Electric Co. slashed its dividend to just a penny a share and said it plans to reorganize its ailing power division as new Chief Executive Officer Larry Culp took his first major steps to save the beleaguered manufacturer. The shares rose.
GE cut its quarterly dividend from 12 cents a share -- only the third reduction since the Great Depression -- which will save GE about $3.9 billion a year.

The Stock Market Held a Sale, and No One Turned Up [WSJ]
The question on which investors need to take a stand: Is this a healthy correction in a bull market with further to run, a reset lower in belated recognition of this year’s geopolitical risks, or the start of a new bear market ahead of recession as soon as next year?
A healthy correction is a classic case of the stock market holding a sale. As market pessimism feeds on itself, take the advice of the father of value investing, Benjamin Graham, and buy from the pessimists. This is usually the right advice in a big market fall, although since the fall has left the market only about where it started the year, it isn’t—yet—that big.

Hedge fund manager on his New York Times stake: 'Newspapers are mostly dead, but the news isn't' [CNBC]
"Newspapers are mostly dead, but the news isn't dead," Gil Simon, SoMa's founder and chief investment officer, said during an interview with CNBC's Leslie Picker at the Sohn conference in San Francisco. "What you've actually seen is a pretty significant evolution in the business model of news, and really, The New York Times is at the forefront of that."
Simon, once the chief investment officer of Apex Capital, likened the news organization's new model to that of up-and-coming music streaming services, which rely heavily on consistent revenue base.

Exclusive: Defense firms see only hundreds of new U.S. jobs from Saudi mega deal [Reuters]
Every time President Donald Trump mentions the $110 billion arms deal he negotiated with Saudi Arabia last year, he quickly follows up, saying “It’s 500,000 jobs.”
But if he means new U.S. defense jobs, an internal document seen by Reuters from Lockheed Martin forecasts fewer than 1,000 positions would be created by the defense contractor, which could potentially deliver around $28 billion of goods in the deal.
Lockheed instead predicts the deal could create nearly 10,000 new jobs in Saudi Arabia, while keeping up to 18,000 existing U.S. workers busy if the whole package comes together - an outcome experts say is unlikely.

BlackRock’s October Plunge Leads Selloff in Asset-Manager Stocks [Bloomberg]
“For the next stretch it’s going to be tough going as investors are likely to shoot first and ask questions later,” Glenn Schorr, an analyst with Evercore ISI, said in a note to investors last week.
An S&P index of asset managers and custody banks is down 14 percent this month, compared with a 9.3 percent drop in the S&P 500 Index. Year to date, the asset managers index has lost almost a quarter of its value and it’s headed for the biggest annual loss since 2008.

Austerity Is Over, Britain Says, Despite Brexit Uncertainty [NYT]
Delivering his final budget speech before Britain’s scheduled exit from the bloc next March, Mr. Hammond announced a tax on multinational digital giants that have been widely criticized for paying little taxes in many European nations.
But his big political message was a promise to end a long-running squeeze on public spending with an injection of extra money for health, education, defense and even for repairing potholes on highways. The amount employees can earn before they pay income tax will also rise, helping increase take-home pay.

Pornstars set up paranormal investigation team after things get really creepy during raunchy shoot [Mirror]
If you search for adult videos, there are probably hundreds of racy Ghostbusters parodies available on the internet.
But a new online series will feature a group of pornstars hunting ghosts in real life - no scripts, or sex toys necessary.
The team, made up of four core members, is known as Paranormal Pornstars and they claim to be looking for answers to the age old question: 'Is there life after death?'