Nobody has ever said that investing in the stock market is a sure thing, but there are some things that you can do that will better ensure your success. One of those things is to make sure that you have a diversified portafolio that will spread out your money and protect you. A lot of beginner investors fail to do this and as one company goes, so goes their entire portfolio.

Diversification in the stock market is like a life insurance policy. You can never be totally sure what one sector is going to do, but having your money spread out over various sectors allows you to get gains in one area when another one might be going backwards. Not every risky investment that you make is going to pay off and a diversified portfolio will help to offset those losses when they happen.

In order to be …

As we stated yesterday, we anticipate that a number of the "Big Banks," such as (but not limited to) Citigroup (C), Wells Fargo (WFC), Bank of America (BAC), JP Morgan (JPM) and US Bancorp (USB) may need to divest a number of non-core or overlap operations in order to preserve capital.To that end, Bank of America announced its intent to sell its First Republic Bank operation, which it acquired through the acquisition of Merrill Lynch. Merrill had acquired First Republic in 2007.First Republic is a private banking and wealth management company (offering personal banking, business banking, trust, brokerage and wealth management services) which specializes in personalized relationship-based services through its preferred banking or trust offices in 10 major metropolitan areas (San Francisco, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Newport Beach, San Diego, Las Vegas, Portland, Seattle, Boston, and New York City). We ...