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FEDEX CORP. $155 (New York symbol FDX; Aggressive Growth Portfolio, Consumer sector; Shares outstanding: 282.4 million; Market cap: $43.8 billion; Price-to-sales ratio: 0.9; Dividend yield: 0.6%; TSINetwork Rating: Average; www.fedex.com) has received approval from European regulators for its deal to buy Netherlands-based courier TNT Express NV. FedEx expects to complete the purchase by October 31, 2015.

The company will pay $4.8 billion. It held cash of $3.5 billion as of August 31, 2015, so it will borrow the funds it needs. Its long-term debt of $7.2 billion is a low 16% of its market cap, so it has lots of room to borrow more, especially at today’s low interest rates.

FedEx is a buy.

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C.R. BARD INC. $184 (New York symbol BCR; Conservative Growth Portfolio, Consumer sector; Shares outstanding: 73.9 million; Market cap: $13.6 billion; Price-to-sales ratio: 4.0; Dividend yield: 0.5%; TSINetwork Rating: Above Average; www.crbard.com) earned $174.7 million in the three months ended September 30, 2015, up 4.7% from $166.9 million a year earlier. Earnings per share rose 6.0%, to $2.28 from $2.15, on fewer shares outstanding.

Sales gained 4.3%, to $865.7 million from $830.0 million. Without the high U.S. dollar’s negative impact, sales rose 8%.

The company is also buying the 50% of Medicon, a joint venture that distributes Bard’s medical devices in Japan. The company will pay $93 million for this stake. Owning all of Medicon will add $40 million to its annual sales.

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NORDSTROM INC. $65 (New York symbol JWN; Aggressive Growth Portfolio, Consumer sector; Shares outstanding: 188.2 million; Market cap: $12.2 billion; Price-to-sales ratio: 0.9; Dividend yield: 2.3%; TSINetwork Rating: Average; www.nordstrom.com) owns and operates 304 stores in the U.S. and Canada that mainly sell upscale clothing and footwear.

The company recently sold its credit card loans to Toronto-Dominion Bank (Toronto symbol TD) for $2.2 billion. It used the cash to cut $325 million from its $2.8-billion debt and pay a special dividend of $4.85 a share, worth a total of $900 million.

Nordstrom will use the remaining funds to buy back $1 billion worth of its stock by March 1, 2017. That’s in addition to the $591 million remaining on its existing repurchase authorization, which expires on March 1, 2016.

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FAIR ISAAC CORP. $93 (New York symbol FICO; Aggressive Growth Portfolio, Manufacturing & Industry sector; Shares outstanding: 31.1 million; Market cap: $2.9 billion; Price-to-sales ratio: 3.3; Dividend yield: 0.1%; TSINetwork Rating: Average; www.fico.com) makes FICO Scores, a computer program that helps businesses make better decisions about customer creditworthiness. FICO Scores dominates this niche market. Fair Isaac also sells software that helps credit card issuers control fraud and analyze cardholders’ spending patterns.

The company spends 12% of its revenue on research, which helps it stay ahead of the competition.

It’s now working to incorporate new data into its software. Right now, for example, FICO Scores doesn’t distinguish between people who carry balances on their credit cards (higher credit risk) and those who’ve never had a credit card but pay their utility and other bills off every month (lower risk). In addition, Fair Isaac plans to add data people publicly share on social media like Facebook. Both moves should make FICO Scores more accurate.

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SYMANTEC CORP. $21 (Nasdaq symbol SYMC; Aggressive Growth Portfolio, Manufacturing & Industry sector; Shares outstanding: 679.2 million; Market cap: $14.3 billion; Price-to-sales ratio: 2.2; Dividend yield: 2.9%; TSINetwork Rating: Average; www.symantec.com) sells computer-security technology, including antivirus and email-filtering software, to businesses and consumers.

In 2014, the company said it would split into two publicly traded firms. One would keep the Symantec name and focus on antivirus and security software and services. The other, called Veritas Technologies, makes products for data backup and recovery.

However, the company has now decided to sell Veritas to a group of private investors for $8.0 billion. It expects to close the deal on January 1, 2016.

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ALCOA INC. $8.99 (New York symbol AA; Conservative Growth Portfolio, Resources sector; Shares outstanding: 1.3 billion; Market cap: $11.7 billion; Price-to-sales ratio: 0.5; Dividend yield: 1.3%; TSINetwork Rating: Average; www.alcoa.com) plans to split itself into two separate firms.

One will focus on Alcoa’s upstream operations, which include mining bauxite ore and refining it into bulk aluminum products. This business will be the world’s fourth-largest aluminum producer, with $13.2 billion of annual revenue and $2.8 billion of gross earnings.

The other company will focus on engineered aluminum products, such as components for cars and jet engines. This firm has $14.5 billion of annual revenue and $2.2 billion of gross earnings.

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STANLEY BLACK & DECKER INC. $107 (New York symbol SWK; Conservative Growth and Income Portfolios, Manufacturing & Industry sector; Shares outstanding: 153.2 million; Market cap: $16.4 billion; Price-to-sales ratio: 1.4; Dividend yield: 2.1%; TSINetwork Rating: Average; www.stanleyblackanddecker.com) earned $234.1 million in the three months ended October 3, 2015, down 5.0% from $246.4 million a year earlier. The company spent $192.1 million on share buybacks in the quarter, so per-share earnings gained 1.3%, to $1.55 from $1.53.

Sales fell 1.7%, to $2.8 billion from $2.9 billion. Stanley gets about half of its sales from outside the U.S., so if you exclude the negative impact of currency rates, sales rose 6%. Stronger demand for its hand tools offset lower sales of its building-security products and tools for industrial users.

The company continues to benefit from a recent restructuring, while lower prices for steel and other raw materials are expanding its profit margins. As a result, Stanley now expects to earn $5.80 to $5.95 a share for all of 2015, up from its earlier forecast of $5.70 to $5.90. The stock trades at an attractive 18.2 times the midpoint of the new range.

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Trading ETFs can work just as well in facilitating dumb moves as it does with smart moves

GENERAL ELECTRIC CO. $29 (New York symbol GE; Conservative Growth and Income Portfolios, Manufacturing & Industry sector; Shares outstanding: 10.1 billion; Market cap: $292.9 billion; Priceto- sales ratio: 2.0; Dividend yield: 3.2%; TSINetwork Rating: Above Average; www.ge.com) continues to shrink its GE Capital subsidiary as part of a plan to focus on its industrial businesses, including jet engines, medical equipment, appliances, lighting and locomotives.

Including its recent deal with Wells Fargo (see left), the company has now sold $126 billion worth of GE Capital’s assets. It should reach its goal of shrinking this business by $200 billion by the end of 2016.

After these sales, the financing business will supply just 10% of GE’s earnings, down from 42% in 2014. The Federal Reserve considers GE Capital a “systemically important financial institution,” so reducing its size should let GE avoid the tougher capitalization requirements and stress tests the Fed imposes on big lenders.

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STATE STREET CORP. $70 (New York symbol STT; Aggressive Growth Portfolio, Finance sector; Shares outstanding: 403.8 million; Market cap: $28.3 billion; Price-to-sales ratio: 2.6; Dividend yield: 1.9%; TSINetwork Rating: Average; www.statestreet.com) sells accounting and administrative services to large institutional investors, such as mutual funds and pension plans.

State Street’s fee income rises and falls with the value of the mutual funds and other securities it manages. Recent stock market weakness reduced the value of its assets under custody and administration by 4.2%, to $27.3 trillion, as of September 30, 2015, compared to the same date a year ago. Assets it manages, including exchange traded funds, fell 9.0% to $2.2 trillion.

These declines lowered the company’s revenue by 1.2% in the third quarter of 2015, to $2.65 billion from $2.68 billion a year earlier.

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J.P. MORGAN CHASE & CO. $66 (New York symbol JPM; Income Portfolio, Finance sector; Shares outstanding: 3.7 billion; Market cap: $244.2 billion; Price-to-sales ratio: 2.6; Dividend yield: 2.7%; TSINetwork Rating: Average; www.jpmorgan chase.com) has four main divisions: Consumer and Community Banking, which includes branches and credit cards (45% of 2014 revenue, 44% of earnings); Corporate and Investment Banking, including brokerage and underwriting services (36%, 33%); Asset Management (12%, 10%); and Commercial Banking (7%, 13%). About 75% of Morgan’s revenue comes from the U.S.

The bank is selling some operations and scaling back in other areas. These moves are in response to the Federal Reserve’s plan to impose tougher capital requirements on banks it feels are too big or complex.

For example, it recently agreed to sell its Canadian credit card businesses to Bank of Nova Scotia (Toronto symbol BNS).

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WELLS FARGO & CO. $55 (New York symbol WFC; Conservative Growth and Income Portfolios, Finance sector; Shares outstanding: 5.1 billion; Market cap: $280.5 billion; Price-to-sales ratio: 3.3; Dividend yield: 2.7%; TSINetwork Rating: Average; www.wellsfargo.com) operates through three divisions: Community Banking provides mortgages, loans, credit cards and other financial services (57% of 2014 revenue, 59% of earnings); Wholesale Banking supplies business loans (27%, 32%); and Wealth, Brokerage and Retirement offers wealth management, brokerage and trust services to individuals and institutions, such as pension plans (16%, 9%).

The bank gets 95% of its revenue from the U.S.

Wells Fargo recently agreed to buy the commercial lending and leasing operations of GE Capital, the financing division of General Electric (see box). These businesses offer loans to help manufacturers boost their inventory, as well as other forms of financing.

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ALPHABET INC. (Nasdaq symbols GOOG $713 [class C: non-voting] and GOOGL $737 [class A: one vote per share]; Aggressive Growth Portfolio, Manufacturing & Industry sector; Shares outstanding: 680.2 million; Market cap: $491.0 billion; Price-tosales ratio: 6.8; No dividends paid; TSINetwork Rating: Above Average; www.abc.xyz) is the new parent company for Google’s Internet search business (still called Google) and other operations, such as self-driving cars and home thermostats. Each of these subsidiaries will function independently.

In the three months ended September 30, 2015, earnings gained 18.7%, to $5.1 billion from $4.3 billion a year earlier. Per-share profits rose 17.6%, to $7.35 from $6.25, on more shares outstanding. Revenue rose 13.0%, to $18.7 billion from $16.5 billion.

The number of paid clicks on advertisers’ads rose 23% in the latest quarter, helping offset an 11% drop in the average cost advertisers paid per click. More users are accessing the Internet with mobile devices, but advertisers pay lower rates for mobile ads because they’re harder to see on smaller screens.

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VISA INC. $79 (New York symbol V; Conservative Growth Portfolio, Finance sector; Shares outstanding: 2.4 billion; Market cap: $189.6 billion; Price-to-sales ratio: 13.9; Dividend yield: 0.7%; TSINetwork Rating: Above Average; www.visa.com) operates the world’s largest electronic payments network, through which it processes credit, debit, prepaid and commercial transactions. The company’s systems can process over 56,000 transactions per second.

Visa gets most of its revenue from fees it charges the card issuers and merchants that use its network. These are based on transaction volumes and other factors. The banks that issue the credit cards are responsible for evaluating customer creditworthiness and collecting payments, not Visa.

The company’s revenue jumped 57.5%, from $8.1 billion in fiscal 2010 to $12.7 billion in 2014 (fiscal years end September 30). Revenue likely rose to $13.9 billion in 2015. Earnings gained 83.3%, from $3.0 billion in 2010 to $5.4 billion in 2014. Visa is an aggressive buyer of its own shares, which is why its earnings per share soared 131.6%, from $0.98 to $2.27.

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