• The Wall Street Journal reported that Ford Motor Company (NYSE: F) is looking for buyers for its Jaguar and Land Rover brands, which are valued at a combined $1.3B to $1.5B, but any sale is expected to take a month or longer.
• Airbus is in the final stages of a deal with U.S. Airways Group Inc (NYSE: LCC), which is expected to purchase about 30 A350 jetliners worth about $7B at list price, according to the Wall Street Journal.

• According to the U.K. Times, Imperial Chemical Industries plc (NYSE: ICI) rejected an all-cash offer of GBP$7.2B from Dutch chemicals giant Akzo Nobel NV (NASDAQ: AKZOY), saying the proposal "significantly undervalues" the company; sources believe The Dow Chemical Company (NYSE: DOW) and Germany's BASF AG (NYSE: BF) could launch competing bids.
• BHP Billiton Limited (NYSE: BHP) is again interested in a $40B acquisition of Alcoa Inc (NYSE: AA), an aluminum producer, reported the U.K. Times.
• The New York Times reported that negotiations on a buyout of Cadence Design System Inc (NASDAQ: CDNS) by private equity firms Blackstone Group and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts appear to have stalled over price.

Most Noteworthy: On an expected light trading day after Thanksgiving, Equity Office Properties (EOP) and Imperial Chemical (ICI) are the only two upgrades on today's list of upgrades.

• UBS Warburg upgraded Equity Office Properties Trust (NYSE:EOP) to Neutral from Reduce and raised their target for the stock to $53 from $39.
• Imperial Chemical Industries (NYSE:ICI) was also upgraded at Citigroup to Hold from Sell after the company sold its Quest unit to Givaudan.

Analyst summaries provided by TheFlyOnTheWall.com (subscription required).

Individual investors gradually are coming home to domestic mutual funds after running from them since early May through mid-September. TrimTabs, an investment research firm that tracks the money flows of mutual funds reports that between Oct. 3 and Oct. 16, U.S. domestic mutual funds received $1.2 billion in new cash, which is an average of $170 million per day. Most of the year, domestic mutual funds were bleeding cash as investors moved to world or international stock funds. In fact, the daily outflow of cash averaged $270 million from May through August 2006.

To put this in perspective, the daily inflows of cash remains well below the amount of cash that went into domestic mutual funds in 2000, before the Internet bubble had burst. In 2000, average cash inflows for domestic mutual funds was $1 billion and annual inflow was $259 billion. For 2006, cash inflow to U.S. equity mutual funds averaged $100 million daily and its annualized inflow is projected to be just $25 billion. 2001 and 2002 was the only recent period of inflows lower than that, with an average inflow of just $15 billion annually.

Why should this matter to mutual fund investors? When mutual funds bleed cash it means that managers must either keep more of the mutual fund's portfolio in cash to be able to meet the redemptions or they could be forced to sell assets in order to give exiting fund holders their money. Maintaining a larger portion of a portfolio in cash means a slower growth rate, since cash doesn't have as much potential for growth as a stock investment does. Being forced to sell assets can result in a loss for the portfolio, especially if the stock being sold is not in a gain position, or it can mean significant capital gains distributions at the end of the year if a significant portion of the stocks that had to be sold had long or short term gains. Either way, the mutual fund holders that stick around can be hurt when a mutual fund experiences large outflows of cash. With the recent increase in inflows, this could now change.