Five buys to enhance your Finance holdings

Article Excerpt

Higher interest rates, and plans by the U.S. Federal Reserve to further raise them, have spurred big gains for U.S. bank stocks. They’ve also lifted the outlook for other Finance-sector companies. We continue to recommend investors buy non-bank stocks as a part of their Finance-sector holdings. While each of the five stocks below has strong long-term prospects, eBay and PayPal are best suited to aggressive investors. VISA INC. $89 (New York symbol V; Conservative Growth Portfolio, Finance sector; Shares outstanding: 2.4 billion; Market cap: $213.6 billion; Price-to-sales ratio: 13.0; Dividend yield: 0.7%; TSINetwork Rating: Above Average; www.visa.com) operates the world’s largest electronic pay ments network. It can process over 65,000 credit, debit, prepaid and commercial transactions per second. Visa gets most of its revenue from the fees it charges the card issuers and merchants that use its network. These fees are based on transaction volumes and other factors. The company set up its European operations (Visa Europe) as an independent firm in 2008. Over…