Savings rates are paltry. Money-market funds pay 1% and bank accounts even less. Commit to a five-year certificate of deposit and you might get 3%. Stock dividends are laughable, especially considering the extra risk attached to them. More than a

Last year, financial firms found themselves in an unprecedented downward spiral. As the nation's largest banks and Wall Street firms teetered on the brink of disaster, they relied on a hand from the federal government. The companies that survived saw

Most stocks are up big since spring and look expensive relative to earnings. The ones below are up huge, but still look cheap.Within the S&P Composite 1500, which tracks small, midsize and large companies that make up 85% of the

Below are stocks found by an experimental screen recipe I'll call Valuation Goulash. It uses no fewer than five price/something measures in an effort to find bargains.First, there's price/earnings, long suspected of predicting stock performance, but first shown conclusively to

Earnings season is fast approaching. Last week, I some stocks for which analysts are in close agreement in their earnings forecasts. Listed below are companies with another promising sign: forecasts that have recently risen.One upward revision in a company's earnings

Tomorrow's business headlines won't be dominated by the companies listed below. They're too small, and their shares are covered by only two to five analysts, vs. a median of 15 for the mostly large companies in the S&P 500 index.Despite