Top 5 Bank Companies For 2014

Top 5 Bank Companies For 2014: Wells Fargo & Company(WFC)

Wells Fargo & Company, through its subsidiaries, provides retail, commercial, and corporate banking services primarily in the United States. The company operates in three segments: Community Banking; Wholesale Banking; and Wealth, Brokerage, and Retirement. The Community Banking segment offers deposits, including checking, market rate, and individual retirement accounts; savings and time deposits; and debit cards. Its loan products comprise lines of credit, auto floor plans, equity lines and loans, equipment and transportation loans, education loans, residential mortgage loans, health savings accounts, and credit cards. This segment also provides equipment leases, real estate financing, small business administration financing, venture capital financing, cash management, payroll services, retirement plans, loans secured by autos, and merchant payment processing services; purchases sales finance contracts from retail merchants; and a family of funds, and investment managemen t services. The Wholesale Banking segment offers commercial and corporate banking products and services, including commercial loans and lines of credit, letters of credit, asset-based lending, equipment leasing, international trade facilities, trade financing, collection services, foreign exchange services, treasury and investment management, institutional fixed-income sales, commodity and equity risk management, insurance, corporate trust fiduciary and agency services, and investment banking services. This segment also provides banking products for commercial real estate market, and real estate and mortgage brokerage services. The Wealth, Brokerage, and Retirement segment offers financial advisory, brokerage, and institutional retirement and trust services. As of December 31, 2010, the company served its customers through approximately 9,000 banking stores in 39 States and the Distri! ct of Columbia. Wells Fargo & Company was founded in 1929 and is headquartered in San Franc i sco, California.

Advisors' Opinion:

• [By Dan Strumpf var popups = dojo.query(".socialByline .popC"); popups.forEach(fu]

  Financial stocks may be outperforming the broader market this year, but that's not good enough for Wells Fargo(WFC), which is downgrading its rating on the sector.

• [By Rich Smith]

  AFP/Getty Images/Frederic J. Brown Over the past decade or so, waves of computer-aided identity theft have washed over the U.S. Since the first big hack attack on ChoicePoint in 2005, through more recent data breaches at Evernote, LivingSocial, and now the massive Target (TGT) breach involving 110 million pieces of data (just the third-largest data breach in U.S. history, by the way), companies have more or less figured out a routine for dealing with data breaches. You notify the FBI. You (eventually) notify your customers. And you replace everybody's credit cards. With the latest breach at Target, that process is already well under way. Megabanks like JP Morgan Chase (JPM), Bank of America (BAC), Wells Fargo (WFC), and Citigroup (C) have collectively handed out millions of new cards, with new card numbers, to customers whose data may have been compromised by the Target data breach. Last week, the Independent Community Bankers of America issued a release confirming its members -- small banks around the country -- have "reissued more than 4 million credit and debit cards." To ensure that credit and debit card numbers that hacker stole from Target and Neiman Marcus will soon be useless, ICBA member bankers absorbed costs in excess of $40 million. And as a result of their quick action, says the group, "community banks' initial fraud costs were relatively low, with less than 1 percent of community bank customers reporting fraud." So, while the Target breach and the "110 million pieces of data lost" sounds bad, the damage probably ! won't be ! as bad as you think. In fact, you can use this epic data fail to your advantage. You Have to Set up New Auto-Payments When your bank sends you a new credit or debit card, it will come with a new number to replace the one that Target lost. Your old number has been canceled. This means any automatic payment plans you've set up -- your subscriptions and the card numbers that you have preselected for payments on Amazon (AMZN), P

• [By David Dittman]

  The top 10 also includes US-based Microsoft Corp (NSDQ: MSFT), JPMorgan Chase & Co (NYSE: JPM) and Wells Fargo & Co (NYSE: WFC).

  Question: I have an MLP in my IRA. Please explain why I should not have one there. Thank you I sure enjoy these web chats.

source from Top Stocks Blog:http://www.topstocksblog.com/top-5-bank-companies-for-2014.html