Top Bank Companies To Buy For 2015

Top Bank Companies To Buy For 2015: Bank of America Corporation(BAC)

Bank of America Corporation, a financial holding company, provides banking and nonbanking financial services and products to individuals, small- and middle-market businesses, large corporations, and governments in the United States and internationally. The company?s Deposits segment generates savings accounts, money market savings accounts, certificate of deposits, and checking accounts; and Global Card Services segment provides the U.S. consumer and business card, consumer lending, international card and debit card services. Its Home Loans & Insurance segment offers consumer real estate products and services, including mortgage loans, reverse mortgages, home equity lines of credit, and home equity loans. It also provides property, disability, and credit insurance. The company?s Global Commercial Banking segment offers lending products, including commercial loans and commitment facilities, real estate lending, leasing, trade finance, short-term credit, asset-based lending, and indirect consumer loans; and capital management and treasury solutions, such as treasury management, foreign exchange, and short-term investing options. Its Global Banking & Markets segment provides financial products, advisory services, settlement, and custody services; debt and equity underwriting and distribution, merger-related advisory services, and risk management products; and integrated working capital management and treasury solutions. The company?s Global Wealth & Investment Management segment offers investment and brokerage services, estate management, financial planning services, fiduciary management, credit and banking expertise, and asset management products. Bank of America Corporation serves customers through a network of approximately 5,900 banking centers and 18,000 automated teller machines. It was formerly known as NationsBank Corporation and change! d its name on October 1, 1998. Bank of America Corporation was founded in 1874 and is based in Charlott e, North Carolina.

Advisors' Opinion:

• [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 mea! ns 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 Reuters]

  LM Otero/AP WASHINGTON -- U.S. job growth accelerated sharply in February despite the icy weather that gripped much of the nation, easing fears of an abrupt economic slowdown and keeping the Federal Reserve on track to continue reducing its monetary stimulus. Employers added 175,000 jobs to their payrolls last month after creating 129,000 new positions in January, the Labor Department said Friday. The unemployment rate, however, rose to 6.7 percent from a five-year low of 6.6 percent, as Americans flooded into the labor market to search for work. "It reinforces the case for the economy being stronger than it's looked for the last couple of months," said Bill Cheney, chief economist at John Hancock Financial Services in Boston. "It makes life easier for the Fed and feeds into continuing the tapering process." The report also showed the largest increase in average hourly earnings in eight months and the payrolls count for December and January was revised up to show 25,000 more jobs created during those months than previously reported. Investors on Wall Street cheered the report and the Standard & Poor's 500 index (^GPSC) reached a fresh intraday record high before falling back to trade little changed. The dollar lifted off a four-month low against a basket of currencies, while the yield on the benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury note jumped to a six-week high, putting it on course for its biggest weekly rise in three months. Interest rate futures showed that traders ramped up bets on the Fed hiking rates a bit sooner than had been previously thought. They now point to a 53 percent probability of a rate hike in June 2015. Unusually cold and snowy weather has disrupted activity in much of the United States for months, and a few economists had begun to speculate that the U.S. central bank could reconsider its plan to! wind dow! n its bond-buying stimulus. With snow and ice covering densely populated areas during the week employers were surveyed for Februar

• [By Sue Chang and Saumya Vaishampayan]

  BAC: Bank of America Corp. (BAC)  shares climbed 3.2%. The stock is getting a boost in part on speculation that the bank could raise its dividend for the coming fiscal year significantly, according to The Motley Fool.

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