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Your Christmas shopping list may hold the key to future riches if you read it in a different light. It's not simply a checklist of needs coupled with a smattering of wants. It's also the key to finding the best stock deals of the holiday shopping season.

For most of the past decade, buying Oreos or Trident gum for your kids meant sending money to the Marlboro Man. Those brands have gone their separate ways, but there are still many odd matches in the wild world of conglomerates, where companies own siblings that don't really look like one another.

Sunbeam Products Inc. recalled 159,000 wine bottle openers sold through the home shopping channel QVC after dozens of consumers reported bottles shattering while using the opener, including 22 who suffered injuries, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission said. Consumers reported injuries...

Wall Street's endless parade of buyouts and mergers, divisions and revisions has created a tangled landscape in which companies that are famous for one thing often own brands that are completely different -- or even diametrically opposed. Here are seven of our favorite mismatches.

An essay in Salon calls the practice of canning "haute," though dismisses it as an inappropriate source of nourishment for people with real day jobs, part of a too-precious do-it-yourself (DIY) craze. The New York Times says we're in the midst of a "canning renaissance" and is more eloquent,...