With all of the factors we have to worry about in our everyday lives, it is somewhat a wonder that we're not only able to survive, but thrive, as a society. Between our personal health, financial health, and various external factors that are well beyond our control, there are an immeasurable amount of worries that plague us each and every day.

Source: Victor Bezrukov, commons.wikimedia.org.

In 2010, a survey commissioned by Cancer Research UK in Britain questioned 2,070 adults on what their biggest fears were in an attempt to help quantify and properly understand these worries. The thought process here was simple: Knowing what concerns citizens the most will allow government agencies to focus on solutions to make people worry less, live happier lives, and likely be more productive.

The survey asked respondents to list their greatest fear from the following list of possible fears:

• Being in debt
• Developing Alzheimer's
• Old age
• Being the victim of a knife crime (only in Britain, right?)
• Cancer
• Being in a plane crash
• Having a heart attack
• Being in a car accident
• Losing your job
• Losing your home
• Motor neurone disease

Think, for a moment, which one, were you asked, would you choose as your biggest fear.

Got it?

Would it shock you to know that more than 20% of respondents given those choices selected cancer as their biggest fear? Coming in a distant second was Alzheimer's disease, which garnered 16% of the votes but was a considerably bigger fear for those aged 65 and older compared with younger respondents.

A worrisome development
Looking at this list I, too, would choose cancer as my biggest fear -- and ultimately there's nothing wrong with that. Genetics have been shown to play a role in whether a person develops cancer in his or her lifetime, and having lost my mother to lung cancer, and my grandfather to kidney cancer, it's a somewhat justified fear that I have a higher genetic predisposition to developing certain cancer types.

What isn't OK is that 34% of respondents who selected cancer believed that a cancer diagnosis was up to fate and that there was nothing they could do about it. Herein lies an opportunity to educate the U.K.'s citizens, point out methods that could help reduce their cancer risks, and, as an investor, potentially invest in the companies that can help reduce risk factors for cancer.

Had this survey been conducted in the U.S., I would suspect the results would be strikingly similar. Yet what people often overlook, according to Cancer Research UK, is that half of all people diagnosed with cancer will still be alive five years from now and 40% will be alive 10 years from now. In short, a cancer diagnosis is no longer the death sentence that it once was, thanks to better risk factor education and more effective medication.

The biggest risk factors for cancer don't involve "fate"
One major risk factor that's been identified is obesity. Cancer is actually the fifth most common disease caused by obesity, with it elevating people's chance of developing breast, colorectal, endometrial, and kidney cancers, just to name a few.

One easy way to educate the public and reduce obesity levels is to encourage physical activity and proper diet. When that's not enough, chronic weight management drug developers Arena Pharmaceuticals with Belviq and VIVUS with Qsymia may be called upon to step in.

Although neither Belviq nor Qsymia proved initially safe enough to be approved in the EU, both anti-obesity drugs are approved in the U.S. and, assuming they get a decent amount of coverage from insurance companies, could make a huge impact on the nearly 36% of the U.S. population that's considered obese. It's a tough call trying to figure out which pill may come out on top, given that Belviq has the better safety profile and VIVUS delivered better weight loss in trials; however, the target audience is large enough that it may not matter.

The butt of the problem
Smoking is another huge factor that has been decisively linked to increasing your risk of developing cancer. In my Tackling Cancer series, smoking was practically a universal risk factor for the 12 most commonly diagnosed cancer types, and cigarette smoking was directly responsible for 37% of all cancer deaths in the U.S. between 2000 and 2004.

Source: Jo Naylor, Flickr.

Unfortunately, many cancers caused by smoking tend to be some of the most aggressive and virulent types, such as lung and pancreatic cancer. While medications do exist to treat lung cancer, the five-year prognosis is fairly grim, with a five-year survival rate of just 17%. This could be where Merck or Bristol-Myers Squibb swoops in to save the day.

Both companies are currently working on a new class of drug in the U.S. known as PD-1 inhibitors, which are suspected to enhance the body's own immune response to attack cancer cells. Merck's lambrolizumab has already received the rare breakthrough therapy designation from the FDA and delivered an overall response rate of 38% in multiple myeloma studies. The response rate was slightly higher, 40%, for Bristol-Myers Squibb's nivolumab, which was combined with its FDA-approved therapy Yervoy to treat multiple myeloma. It's expected that PD-1 inhibitors could have success in treating the most common form of lung cancer, non-small-cell lung cancer, and their development should be closely monitored. 

Overexposure
A third common form of cancer that's under our control is melanoma, a type of skin cancer that isn't often as deadly as some of the aforementioned cancers but is caused from overexposure to the sun over the course our lives. There's nothing wrong with spending some time in the sun, but like everything in life it should be done with some moderation.

While this may not be a huge problem for those polled in the U.K. (or for me in the Seattle suburbs), it is still a big problem at least in the U.S., with nearly 77,000 estimated diagnoses in the U.S. this year alone.

The best and most obvious solution here is to wear protective sunscreen and reduce your exposure to the sun to a moderate level. If a person is already well beyond that stage, two newly approved melanoma drugs from GlaxoSmithKline may ultimately be called upon to do the trick. The drugs, Tafinlar and Mekinist, target the most common type of skin cancer that expresses the BRAF mutation. In trials, progression-free survival of the combo improved to 9.4 months, compared with 5.8 months for those taking Tafinlar by itself, with a whopping 41% of patients not exhibiting any signs of disease progression at 12 months!

Live long and conquer
There's nothing wrong with having fears, but we also have to understand that many of the tools capable of reducing those fears are within our grasp. Cancer is certainly a scary six-letter word, but we have rapidly improving medicines capable of extended patients' quality of life, and a better understanding of the risk factors that can lead to an elevated risk of developing cancer.

In addition, not only do we have the tools necessary to reduce our cancer risk, but we also have a pathway to potentially increase our wealth in the process. The aforementioned companies are literally but a handful of those that stand to benefit from treating cancer patients. As research dollars and education progresses, it's only logical to expect the quality of cancer treatments to improve as well.

It's all about small tablets these days. That segment of the tablet market is going wild right now as consumers flock toward affordable mobile devices that fulfill their casual computing needs.

Apple stepped in last year in a big way, with the iPad Mini at the $329 price point. The smaller version's biggest weakness is easily the lackluster display. At 1024 x 768, the display already lagged rival devices from Amazon.com and Google, both of which used 1280 x 800 panels in their smaller 7-inch tablets from 2012. Apple can fend off rivals on other competitive strengths, like a wider tablet-optimized app ecosystem or sturdier build quality -- but only for so long.

Several reports have surfaced this month that Apple may be forced to delay the Retina iPad Mini. Earlier this week, DIGITIMES said that a redesigned fifth-generation full-sized iPad was still on track for a launch this fall, but that Apple's running into some hurdles with a smaller Retina display. Apple has been challenged with manufacturing yields at suppliers on a high-resolution 7.9-inch panel, threatening the device's schedule.

A fresh report from China's Economic Daily News believes that Apple has indeed delayed the Retina iPad Mini's launch until early 2014 because of the troubles it's having.

Apple can't afford to wait that long.

Rivals are expected to beef up their displays even further with their 2013 models, up to approximately 1920 x 1200, in which case even Apple's strong iOS ecosystem may not be enough to defend against rivals. A Retina display is expected to use the same approach of doubling pixel dimensions, which would put it at 2048 x 1536. Apple is also unlikely to just ship a different display inside as a temporary solution, since there are negative consequences to its platform in the form of hardware fragmentation and app compatibility.

Additionally, delaying the device until 2014 would mean that Apple's most promising new product would mostly sit on the sidelines during the all-important holiday shopping season. The relatively low resolution on an aging device wouldn't stand up very well next to sharp new tablets from Amazon and Google.

Most European castles are situated in strategically significant locations: on cliffs overlooking the sea, square in the middle of valleys, at the entrance to mountain passes, and at carefully selected crossing points along rivers. This isn't a coincidence, as the power of their inhabitants derived largely from the ability to control the channels of commerce.

A similar concept explains why Wells Fargo , the nation's fourth largest bank by assets, has had so much success over the past few years. That is, it alone is responsible for upwards of a third of the domestic mortgage market. It controls, if you will, the narrows of the multitrillion-dollar home lending industry.

We saw the tangible results on Friday, when the mortgage giant reported yet another record quarterly profit, earning a staggering $5.5 billion during the three months ended June 30. But beyond the sheer magnitude of that profit, and because of its strategic significance, the most notable thing about Wells Fargo's results was what they implied about the broader economy.

With that in mind, here are five things CEO John Stumpf had to say about it, and other topics, on the mortgage giant's conference call.

1. On the economy

We continue to be optimistic about the improvements we are seeing throughout the economy. While commercial loan demand is still modest, jobs are being created, consumer confidence is increasing, and the housing market continues to demonstrate strong momentum. In fact, in the second quarter, the housing market movement was stronger and more broad-based than it has been since before 2008.

2. On home prices

The thing I hear most about when I'm out in the marketplace is lack of inventory. And so we are expecting that prices will continue to improve, maybe not at levels they have in the past, but housing sure has strength to it.

3. On mortgage rates

If you were in the mortgage market before 2000, you know that these are [still] unbelievably good rates. My first mortgage was at 8.5%. My second one was 11.5%. I thought those were great rates at those times. So affordability still is there.

4. On bank branches

We're a retailer. So most retailers that I respect are always looking at their distribution footprint and model. But the long and the short of it is that we believe in the store concept.

5. On checking accounts

When I wake up in the morning and get here, the first thing I look at is checking account data from the day before. I love checking accounts. I dream about them ... because it's a formational account for a consumer. And the second probably most important is a mortgage.

There's finally something other than the Federal Reserve and "tapering" for traders to obsess over. At the beginning of last week, Alcoa unofficially kicked off second-quarter earnings season. If you're wondering how things are going thus far, here's a hint: The S&P 500 proceeded to finish the week at a new all-time high of 1,680, up by 2.4%.

Now, it should be noted that Alcoa is no longer the economic bellwether it once was. As The Wall Street Journal pointed out, "It is not only a cliche that Alcoa 'sets the tone' for earnings season -- it is also no longer really true."

But while it isn't the bellwether of old, that's a far cry from saying that its results are irrelevant. It's for this reason that investors collectively exhaled when the aluminum giant reported better-than-expected earnings per share of $0.07 compared with a consensus estimate of $0.06 per share. On top of this, as my colleague Dan Carroll noted at the time, Alcoa still expects global aluminum demand to rise as much as 7% this year.

The best news of the week came on Friday, with the release of earnings from JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo . Both banks reported stellar quarters. JPMorgan earned $1.60 a share, compared with the consensus estimate of $1.45. And Wells Fargo's earnings per share of $0.98 beat forecasts by $0.05.

Moreover, the icing on the cake was what the respective CEOs had to say about the economy. JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon noted, "We continue to see broad-based signs that the U.S. economy is improving and we are hopeful that, as jobs are added and confidence builds, the U.S. economy will strengthen over time." And Wells Fargo's John Stumpf expressed unqualified optimism about the "improvements we are seeing throughout the economy."

What does this mean going forward? While this is still too small of a sample size to generalize, it's impossible to deny that earnings season is off to a good start. Up next week are a multitude of giants, including Coca-Cola on Tuesday, Bank of America and Intel on Wednesday, Microsoft on Thursday, and General Electric on Friday. Stay tuned in to Fool.com to get the latest news on these companies.

Biotech's the biggest boom-or-bust business on the market, with regulatory approvals and clinical trial results routinely sending stocks hurtling up or down by significant amounts. Even the Nasdaq Biotechnology Index can swing wildly with a strong week, the way it did over the past five days, shooting up by nearly 5.5% -- more than twice the S&P 500's gains for the week despite the S&P's run up to record highs.

What fueled biotech's big gains this week? Let's check out three of the top movers in the industry and dig into what you need to know.

Celldex falls, but potential remains
Celldex Therapeutics didn't help the biotech industry's cause this week with a 4.4% dip, but the drop wasn't for a lack of performance recently. It's hard to pick out stocks that have rewarded investors as Celldex has this year, as shares of the company, which is in the developmental stage as it builds up its phase 3  trial for glioblastoma-fighting Rindopepimut, have jumped an explosive 200% year to date. That's the kind of booms that a biotech investment get can you.

Celldex didn't have bad news plague its week, either -- on the contrary, this company's been humming along just fine recently. For a company still early on its life, Celldex has looked strong so far as it develops Rindopepimut and CDX-011, its phase 2 drug candidate to fight a difficult form of breast cancer. This week's fall seems more about investors looking to pull back on gains more than anything else, but CDX-011 and Rindopepimut both have looked strong in combatting stubborn diseases so far, and this stock has proved that big gains are no problem. In the world of biotech, a 200% year-to-date run-up certainly doesn't preclude even higher gains if Celldex's good momentum keeps up.

Alexion Pharmaceuticals posted a much better week for investors, as the orphan disease-treating company's shares jumped 18.5% over the past five days. In the biotech world, buyout rumors are hype-worthy events -- and Alexion's right in the center of one, as Big Pharma's Roche is reportedly looking into adding the company to its ranks, according to sources listed by Reuters.

It won't be a cheap buy for Roche: Alexion's already valued at more than $22 billion by its market cap. However, Alexion's worth the money: Its orphan blood disease-treating Soliris, the company's only drug on the market, racked up more than $1.1 billion in sales last year, a 45% year-over-year gain that's only headed higher. Analysts expect around $1.5 billion in sales for the drug this year and north of $2.5 billion by 2017, helped out by the therapy's costly list price of more than $400,000. For Roche, expanding into orphan drugs with big potential -- especially with Alexion's second orphan drug in the pipeline, asfotase alfa, gaining a development-expediting breakthrough therapy designation from the FDA back in May -- is worth a big payout. For Alexion investors, it could be a marvelous addition to what's been a great run-up for this biotech boomer.

Yet no stock in biotech had a week like Alnylam Pharmaceuticals , whose stock shot up more than 32% over the past five days. Company shares rocketed up 19% on Thursday alone, after the company released early-stage clinical results that showed Alnylam's developmental therapy ALN-TTRsc, a treatment for a rare genetic disorder, reduced levels of the disease, transthyretin (or TTR) amyloidosis, by 80%. Alnylam also noted that the drug had been well received by clinical subjects, a critical key for investors cautious about the drug's safety.

It's important to note that the subcutaneous ALN-TTRsc's still in early trials, but both it and Alnylam's injectable ALN-TTR02, another early-stage treatment for gene disorders, have shown promise so far. Alnylam will have to show more of the same down the road, but it's so far, so good for this biotech in its early going. Alnylam's stock has shot up by more than 170% so far, so expect likely volatility in the future -- but in the big picture, positive results are all that matter for long-term biotech investors.

Interest rates are rising, and mortgage rates have gone along for the ride. According to Freddie Mac, for the week of July 12, 2012, the average rate on a U.S. 30-year fixed-rate mortgage was 3.56%. Freddie's report for this past week showed that the rate had jumped to 4.51%.

Earnings reports from Wells Fargo  and JPMorgan Chase  on Friday visibly showed the downside of the rising-rate environment. As rates rise, the refinancing boom has slowed, and that's damping the mortgage-origination fees that these mortgage giants collect. At the same time, rising rates are hurting the banks' securities portfolios. During the first quarter, on a pre-tax basis, Wells Fargo had north of $6 billion in unrealized investment losses.

But it's not all bad news. In recent quarters, a pain point for banks has been declining net interest margins -- i.e., the spread between loan income and borrowing costs that they keep as profit. As rates rise, that could start to reverse. And if we see a continuation of the following chart, it could reverse dramatically.

In this chart you can identify the 30-year fixed mortgage-rate line by looking for the one that's spiking dramatically. The other two lines represent changes in the rates paid on money market accounts and five-year CDs. What we're seeing is mortgage rates jumping while the rates paid out remain relatively flat. That suggests the potential for a big jump in spread income.

And while many of us may think of banking deposits as interest-free checking accounts that cost a bank nothing (in interest at least), banks are heavily funded by interest-bearing accounts such as money markets and CDs. At the end of last quarter, Bank of America , for instance, had $662 billion in interest-bearing deposits -- largely money market type accounts -- versus $358 billion in non-interest-bearing deposits. At US Bancorp , it breaks down to $149 billion interest-bearing and $68 billion non-interest-bearing.

To be sure, the rising rate environment will continue to present challenges, but if you're a banker, or a bank investor, this is the kind of thing that should make you smile.

Despite a few big losers this past week, which we'll get to in a moment, the major indexes all performed really well during the past five trading sessions, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average even set a new all-time closing high on both Thursday and Friday. The blue-chip index closed on Friday at 15,464, after gaining 328 points, or 2.17%, this past week. The S&P 500 outperformed the Dow, by rising 2.96% over the past five days, but it was beaten by the Nasdaq, which increased by 3.46%.

The main stimulant for the rise came after the markets closed on Wednesday, when Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke held a press conference in which he reassured investors that the central bank's accommodative policies would continue for the foreseeable future.

Before we hit the Dow losers, let's look at this week's best-performing component: Caterpillar . After being one of the biggest losers for two weeks, with the stock declining 0.42%, shares of Caterpillar rose 6.12% this past week. Many analysts have contributed Caterpillar's rising share price with rising gold prices this week. As concerns about inflation creep into investors' minds, gold is seen as a safe haven and a shield against losing buying power, and increasing precious-metal prices help mining companies and mining equipment manufacturers such as Caterpillar. But despite a strong one-week performance, shares of Caterpillar are still down 2.72% year to date.  

The big losers
Going into Friday, shares of Boeing were higher for the week by 2.57%, but that all quickly changed on Fridat at around noon ET, when reports hit the news wires about a Boeing 787 Dreamliner on fire at London's Heathrow Airport. Shares of the aircraft manufacturer initially fell more than 7% on Friday but closed the day down 4.69%, leaving the company as the worst performing Dow component of the week, as shares lost 2.23% for the past five trading sessions. While initial reports don't clearly specify what caused the fire on the 787, since the plane has a very short history with a number of malfunctions and one previous fire caused by the battery system, many investors feared for the worst and quickly dumped their shares.  

Another stock that was just slightly lower going into the last day of the week but ended with a terrible Friday was Verizon , which lost 1.73% over the past five trading days had 1.56% of that decline come on Friday alone. The main cause of the decline was a Moffett Research analyst's belief that the wireless company's commitment with Apple -- through which Verizon would sell $23.5 billion worth of iPhones during the year -- won't be upheld. Moffett thinks Verizon will sell only around $14 billion worth of iPhones during 2013, which easily misses the lofty sales figures it had agreed to. While it's unknown what penalty, if any, Apple would enforce, the fact is that Verizon may not hit its sales goals and therefore may miss forecasted revenues and profits for the remainder of the year.  

After losing 1.46% this past week, shares of IBM ranked as the third worst performing Dow component of the week. The biggest decline came on Tuesday, when the stock fell 1.88% after Goldman Sachs downgraded the stock from a "buy" to "neutral" and cut its price target from $220 to $200. The Goldman analyst responsible for the move was Bill Shope, who cited increasing pressure in emerging markets. IBM currently relies on such areas in its five-year growth plan for roughly $17 billion in revenue. This is certainly something current shareholders will need to keep an eye on, and if Shope is wrong, the stock may realize a nice move higher.

The other Dow losers this week:

(For more information on why shares of the other losers fell lower this past week, click on the link below.)

• ended the week lower by 0.66%
• lost 0.05%

The following video is from Wednesday's installment of The Motley Fool's Weekly Tech Review, in which analysts Eric Bleeker and Jason Moser look at the biggest stories driving the tech sector this week.

Microsoft's five-year performance is on par with that of Qualcomm -- stunning when you consider Microsoft has a negligible smartphone presence and Qualcomm has become the Intel of the mobile world. That brings up an interesting question: Have smartphones actually been a winning investment?

After all, while companies such as Apple -- in spite of its recent share-price struggles -- have been winners, there have also been a host of losing investments. Over a five-year time frame, an investor who'd bet equally between BlackBerry  and Apple would still be beating the Nasdaq over the same time period, but not by a tremendous sum. 

As Eric describes in the video, while PCs showed nearly continuous growth over 30 years, smartphones are on a different trajectory. Little more than a half decade after the iPhone and Android started taking off, investors are already concerned that growth in the high-end smartphones that bring in the most profit is stalling. Simply put, PCs had slower growth across those 30 years, but they also had a long time period where investors weren't fretting about future PC growth.

That means that while mobile companies such as Apple have racked up historic earnings in recent years, the focus on future growth has cut back share price growth of mobile companies during the past year. To see Eric and Jason's full thoughts, watch the following video. 

The relevant video segment can be found between 3:15 and 7:43.

Ever since the Supreme Court upheld the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (nearly in its entirety) last June, we've been examining nearly every facet of the transformative health reform law.

Source: White House on Flickr.

Known also as Obamacare, the PPACA offers a lot of promise to improve the transparency of the health care system, expedite the process of obtaining health insurance, and greatly expanding the number of individuals who have health insurance. As we've also conjectured, it has some potential downfalls, which may include failing to reduce insurance premium prices and placing a larger burden on the middle class.

As the implementation date grows nearer for Obamacare, a set of surprising new repercussions that few saw coming are beginning to rear their head. While not devastating, the following possibilities do have the potential to negatively impact your health care, the health of your portfolio, and the economy as a whole.

1. Hospitals are cutting back on capital expenditures.
The hospital sector has been revered as the biggest winner of all under the new health care reform -- and it's not hard to understand why. The two largest hospital operators in the U.S., HCA Holdings and Tenet Healthcare , both lost a significant sum of their revenue to doubtful accounts last year by treating patients who were unable to pay their bill. For HCA, this figure totaled close to $3.8 billion, while it was a more subdued $785 million for Tenet. The individual mandate portion of the PPACA, which requires everyone to carry health insurance, should go a long way to eliminating a good chunk of this doubtful provision.

However, leading up to the implementation of Obamacare, hospitals have a lot of questions to face. Specifically, what happens if uninsured people aren't given the proper training on how to purchase health insurance through the new state-run exchanges, or what happens if the state-run exchanges have technical glitches? The answer to that question is that doubtful accounts may fall by a much smaller sum than expected.

One of my hypotheses until now had been that Obamacare's positive effect on reducing doubtful provisions could allow hospital operators to purchase state-of-the-art equipment that would improve patient care and provide differentiation from other hospitals (i.e., a comparative advantage). We actually may be seeing the opposite of this occurring, with hospitals holstering their spending until a few quarters after the implementation of the PPACA to get a better sense of how many people actually purchased health insurance versus those who are simply choosing to take the end-of-the-year penalty.

This, I proposed earlier this week, could be the reasoning behind weaker sales of the Intuitive Surgical's da Vinci robotic surgical system. The robotic soft tissue surgical device tends to be costlier than standard laparoscopic procedures, but can reduce hospital stays compared to traditional surgery, possibly making it a cheaper overall option for some people. The device itself, though, costs well beyond $1.5 million, which is a cost that many hospitals would rather not endure with so many question marks still surrounding Obamacare. All told, Intuitive sold just 143 of its devices in the U.S. this quarter compared to 150 last year.

2. Insurance companies are being stingier with their approved procedures/medications.
In contrast to the hospital sector, few industries were expected to be hit harder from Obamacare than the insurance industry.

A year ago, the insurance sector was viewed as a rather opaque marketplace where insurers could raise their premiums at will to cover the costs of medical care. Under the new Obamacare, insurers will be required to spend at least 80% of their premium collected on medical care for their members or return the difference. The obvious beneficiary here should be the plan members, who will either receive much needed medical care or get reimbursed.

What we may actually be seeing is the same gun-shy approach to approving medical procedures and medications among insurers as we've seen in the hospital sector. Yet again, the culprit appears to be the uncertainty surrounding whether a large number of currently uninsured people will remain uninsured. WellPoint made a $4.5 billion bet by purchasing AMERIGROUP last year that it would gain a significant number of currently uninsured low income individuals under the proposed Medicaid expansion. If these people don't sign up for health insurance, then WellPoint's purchase will have been for naught.

In order to do their best to conserve cash leading up into the full implementation of the bill, I wouldn't be surprised to see insurers denying or declining to pick up the tab on what they deem overpriced procedures. Not to pick on Intuitive Surgical again, but the company did mention, "a trend by payers toward encouraging conservative management and treatment in outpatient settings." Another potential victim here is Dendreon , whose cellular immunotherapy known as Provenge that's used to treat advanced prostate cancer costs $93,000 annually. By comparison, Johnson & Johnson's Zytiga costs just $5,500 per month ($66,000 annually) and would be the better cost-effective choice for insurers, potentially leaving Provenge out in the cold.

3. The push to part-time employment is a lot bigger than we thought.
It hasn't been a secret that a select few businesses were going to use the scope of the PPACA to their advantage and kick their current and new hires below the 30-hour threshold defined as full-time employment. What's surprising is that many those "few businesses" are turning out to be America's largest employers.

Under the PPACA, businesses of 50 or more employees (defined as medium or large businesses) are required to supply health care options to their employees. While they aren't required to subsidize the cost of their employee's health care premiums, they do run the risk of being fined from $2,000 to $3,000 per employee for each instance of premium costs totaling more than 9.5% of an employee's income. As you can see, for the nation's largest companies that don't already have universal health benefits in place (e.g., Costco), this could be a costly dilemma.

Despite a survey conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis in March that indicated only 4% of respondents had altered their hiring habits to part-time or cut workers' hours in response to the coming implementation of Obamacare, the repercussions on take-home income and health care availability are huge if this 4% represents any of the U.S.'s largest employers.

Take Wal-Mart , for example, which in 2011 told future employees who work less than 24 per week on average that they'd no longer qualify for health care. In addition, it removed spouses from its insurance plan coverage for those who worked 24 to 33 hours on average per week. You might be thinking, "OK, so this is just Wal-Mart being Wal-Mart!" But remember, prior to Obamacare being passed, Wal-Mart did hire full-time employees. And, most importantly, it is still the No. 1 retail employer in the U.S. with 2.2 million employees!

Don't be fooled by the relatively small number of employers that are cutting hours. Instead, note the size of the employers that say they are cutting hours and you'll understand better why that's a big concern with regard to consumer spending growth and the unemployment picture.

For a carrier focusing so heavily on transparency and communication with consumers, T-Mobile's freshly unveiled Jump program is a bit confusing. On the surface, it sounds great: two smartphone upgrades every year instead of one smartphone upgrade every two years.

The devil is in the details. Should you buy into Jump?

How it works
To sign up for the program, subscribers will pay $10 per month. Included in the service is a comprehensive handset protection program (i.e., insurance) that covers things such as malfunction, damage, loss, and theft. The real kicker is the upgrade frequency that's included.

T-Mobile says the fee is only $2 more than what most people pay for handset protection alone. For reference, AT&T and Verizon Wireless both charge $7 for their protection programs, and Sprint Nextel prices at $8. All four carriers outsource the insurance underwriting to Asurion.

Six months after initial enrollment, customers can upgrade their smartphone twice every 12 months. To do so, customers just trade in their device and any remaining finance payments owed on the older device are eliminated, and they then purchase a new device for the listed upfront pricing with the associated financing plans. Devices that are traded in need to be in "good working condition," and there is a $20 to $170 deductible if there's any damage. There's no mention of receiving any residual value back.

But at what cost?
Let's look at it from a T-Mobile customer's perspective. Any smartphone user who's interested in upgrading this frequently faces two alternatives, with the first being Jump. The second choice is to simply buy smartphones at full retail and sell them to another user in six months after depreciation. I'll exclude service costs for this comparison.

To start, let's say you bought a flagship smartphone such as Apple's iPhone 5, which costs $146 upfront in addition to monthly payments of $21. You'll pay $60 in Jump fees before the first upgrade eligibility. For the first six months, that's $332 in total costs before making the jump to a new device.

Alternatively, you could purchase the same entry-level iPhone 5 for $650 and simply sell it after six months if you wanted to upgrade. Priceonomics did a study last year on smartphone resale value and found that on average, smartphones lose 25% of their value in the first six months (iPhones tend to hold their value better than other devices.) That suggests you could sell a 6-month-old iPhone 5 for $488 and lose only $163 in depreciation. Recent completed listings on eBay back up this theory, as does a Piper Jaffray study on smartphone resale values. That's half of what you lose in the Jump scenario.

The figures for other flagships such as Samsung's Galaxy S4 or HTC's One are similar (both have the same pricing). Under Jump, the first six months cost $280, while depreciation on the $580 retail price would be close to $145 -- again, roughly half as much.

Of course, with Jump you also get the insurance bundled in, but that still doesn't fully explain the cost difference. You could purchase standalone handset protection from T-Mobile for $8 per month, or $48 for six months. There's also the added convenience of an easy trade-in instead of having to sell your device on eBay or Craigslist, but how much is that convenience worth?

Look before you jump
As it stands, Jump isn't all that great of a deal. Customers who are interested in semiannual upgrades are better off just reselling their phones when they want to upgrade. You don't even have to necessarily pay full price upfront, since T-Mobile still offers financing plans; you'd just sell your device and pay off the balance when you're ready to make the switch.

Jump's incremental $2 per month over standalone insurance sounds enticing, but it appears that the carrier may profit on the trade-in once it turns around and resells the used device, since it's not giving back any residual value.

Don't make the Jump.

Dividend stocks have gotten incredibly popular among investors as the search for income has led many to take on more risk in their portfolios in order to generate the cash flow they need from their investments. With the S&P 500 once again at new highs, another draw of dividend stocks is that historically, they've tended to perform better than the overall market during pullbacks, making more conservative investors feel more comfortable with dividend payers.

But some companies are more generous with dividends than others. Let's take a look at the 15 blue-chip companies that have paid more than $5 billion in dividends to their shareholders over the past 12 months, according to the latest figures from S&P Capital IQ.

 Source: S&P Capital IQ. *Reflects three quarters of dividend payments.

As you can see from the table, energy and telecom stocks continue to dominate the list, with the extensive cash flow that those businesses generate outweighing any concerns about future growth in their respective industries. Perhaps the most impressive thing about companies like ExxonMobil and AT&T is that in addition to those dividends, they also maintain massive multibillion-dollar share buybacks as well.

Increasingly, though, we've seen technology stocks start to become dividend payers. Historically, most tech giants have grown fast enough to justify plowing spare cash into internal growth initiatives. But more recently, mature tech companies have had more money than they know what to do with. For instance, Apple started paying a dividend last August, caving to pressure from activist investors arguing that the company's nine-figure cash hoard was a waste of shareholder capital. When S&P Capital IQ includes Apple's latest augmented dividend payment, it should vault the company into the No. 2 spot. Meanwhile, Microsoft has paid dividends longer than Apple, but it too has lifted its payout substantially in recent years to reflect the substantial income that its stalwart Office and Windows software packages produce.

The other area where dividends are making a comeback is in financial stocks. Both Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase made dramatic dividend cuts during the financial crisis after receiving TARP bailouts, but since then, the companies have both bolstered their respective financial conditions. JPMorgan's latest payout equals its dividend rate from before the 2009 cut, while Wells now pays six times what it did at the height of the crisis. So long as favorable trends in the banking industry last, the return of financial stocks to healthy dividend status will be a welcome turnaround for investors.

Don't miss out on dividends
These blue-chip examples show how easy it is to get dividend income from your portfolio with promising stocks. With these companies returning billions of dollars to shareholders every year, there's no reason why you should miss out on the opportunity they present now.

The recent unrest in Egypt has drawn the attention of the entire world. A backlash against Mohamed Morsi, the nation's first democratically elected president, spurred a coup by the Egyptian military early this month. With the transitional government working to form a cabinet and restore order, the country is a potential powder keg as the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists find themselves under threat of arrest.

As you'd expect during times of trouble, the stock market in Egypt plunged during early June as protests gradually grew in force and the conflict began to escalate. Yet courageous investors bought into the market during those declines, and since the military has taken power, the Egyptian stock market has recovered almost to its pre-conflict level. As the new government fleshes itself out, is now the right time to invest in Egypt?

Image source: Wikimedia Commons.

Finding your way in
The first thing to realize about investing in Egypt is that it's not terribly easy. The most popular way for U.S. investors to invest in Egypt is the Market Vectors Egypt ETF , which owns more than two dozen different stocks in the Middle Eastern country. The reason: Most of the stocks you'll find inside that ETF aren't available on major exchanges within the U.S., making it very difficult for investors to buy the stocks directly. The ETF is primarily concentrated in financial and telecom stocks, which make up almost 75% of its investments, with the remaining quarter of the fund's assets invested in the energy and basic-materials sectors.

Still, most investors haven't seen the crisis as an opportunity to invest in Egypt, making it a potential contrarian opportunity. Most analysts have instead looked at the current Egyptian crisis as a potential problem for global trade. With the strategically placed Suez Canal and oil pipeline greatly facilitate trade between Europe and Asia, especially for energy products, unrest in Egypt could threaten shipping and lead to trade disruptions that in turn could create temporary price moves for important commodities.

Solving the economic problems
Most of the discussion of Egypt's problems have centered on political clashes. But underlying those conflicts is the basic fact that the nation's gross domestic product has been falling recently in inflation-adjusted terms, leading to massive unemployment that compares unfavorably even to the sky-high jobless rates we've seen in hard-hit areas of Europe. Moreover, outdated policies -- e.g., expensive fuel-price subsidies that keep the price of gasoline artificially low -- have sapped financial resources away from potentially more productive uses like skills-training and investment in higher-growth industries such as technology and manufacturing. Those impediments sent the value of the Egypt ETF's price down by half between its inception in early 2010 and the late 2011 unrest that led to the ouster of former President Hosni Mubarak and the eventual election of Morsi.

Egypt ETF Total Return Price data by YCharts.

Optimists now hope Egypt will be able to apply for assistance from the International Monetary Fund to help develop its economy. Unfortunately, without the extensive oil and gas reserves that so many of its neighbors benefit from, Egypt faces challenges that are unusual among its closest peers.

Hope for the future
For investors, though, the experience of investing in other countries following periods of civil strife and political upheaval should provide some solace. In Greece, demonstrations have continued under government austerity programs, but the stock market there is still up about 60% from about a year ago despite having given up ground lately. Spain, which also suffers from high unemployment, has climbed by about a third from year-ago levels.

There's no guarantee that Egypt will be able to match those gains, as a 50% rise in the Egyptian ETF during the first nine months of 2012 proved fleeting. But a lasting solution to the crisis there would make it clear in hindsight that now was the right time to invest in Egypt.

The following video is from Wednesday's installment of The Motley Fool's Weekly Tech Review, in which analysts Eric Bleeker and Jason Moser look at the biggest stories driving the tech sector this week.

According to South Korean news outlet ETNews, Samsung is in crisis mode over its fading Galaxy S4 sales. Samsung's realizing what Apple has been confronting -- namely, that high-end smartphone growth is at an end. The conglomerate's solution to the problem? Release more phones! As a point of contrast, it's in Apple's DNA to do yearly releases. Could Apple benefit from Samsung's crisis?

The relevant video segment can be found between 0:00 and 3:16.

The following video is from Wednesday's installment of The Motley Fool's Weekly Tech Review, in which analysts Eric Bleeker and Jason Moser look at the biggest stories driving the tech sector this week.

Barnes & Noble's CEO is outta here. The stock soared 5.3% the next day. Is this a blessing in disguise for investors?

The exec shake-up is similar to what happened at Zynga, says Eric. That stock soared after CEO Mark Pincus merely changed positions, because investors are aching for change. Likewise, B&N investors are looking for a dramatic shift. A strategic review at the company means its Nook could potentially be sold off wholesale to minority owner Microsoft , and its College Bookstores could likewise be spun off. Jason argues that B&N's greatest value lies in its bricks-and-mortar stores. Will Barnes & Noble make the right restructuring moves?

The relevant video segment can be found between 7:30 and 11:22.

The following video is from Wednesday's installment of The Motley Fool's Weekly Tech Review, in which analysts Eric Bleeker and Jason Moser look at the biggest stories driving the tech sector this week.

Time Warner , AT&T , and DIRECTV are all bidding on Hulu. Sure, the streaming star has a nice content assortment, but what these bidders are really paying for is branding. Hulu's market share of about 10% may not seem that impressive, but it has great recognition and app placement within major platforms such as Roku and the Xbox. In the following video, Eric and Jason break down the streaming star's appeal.

The relevant video segment can be found between 0:00 and 3:44.