Updating Sony Corp., Fair Isaac Corp., Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Archer Daniels Midland Co.

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SONY CORP. ADRs $22 (New York symbol SNE; Conservative Growth Portfolio, Manufacturing & Industry sector; ADRs outstanding: 1 billion; Market cap: $22 billion; Price-to-sales ratio: 0.3; WSSF Rating: Above Average) has struck a new alliance with Internet search engine Google. Sony hopes the new arrangement will spur sales of its Sony Reader electronic book device. Over the past few years, Google has converted several million books into electronic form. Under this new deal, users of the Sony Reader can download titles from Google for free, but only books whose copyrights have expired. Still, that’s over 500,000 titles. This deal should help Sony’s device compete with the popular Kindle book reader from online bookseller Amazon.com. Sony is a buy. FAIR ISAAC CORP. $14 (New York symbol FIC; Aggressive Growth Portfolio, Manufacturing & Industry sector; Shares outstanding: 48.8 million; Market cap: $683.2 million; Price-to-sales ratio: 0.9; WSSF Rating: Average) is changing its corporate identity to FICO. (FICO is an acronym for Fair Isaac Corp.)…