SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Bank of America Corp. took top honors for the second year in a row in a report ranking the largest U.S. banks on how well they protect their customers from fraud and identity theft.

J.P. Morgan Chase, Washington Mutual Inc. and Wells Fargo Co. tied for second place, and Citibank came in third in the study published Wednesday by Javelin Strategy & Research.

The study looked at 25 banks that together hold 50% of U.S. checking-account deposits and counted only banks that have a brick-and-mortar presence. The study measured banks' policies for preventing, detecting and resolving fraud, focusing on measures that consumers experience, not internal bank security policies.

For instance, banks got top marks for alerting customers of unusual transactions -- say, a wire transfer to a foreign country or an unusually big withdrawal amount, said James Van Dyke, president of Javelin Strategy & Research, a Pleasanton, Calif.-based research company specializing in financial services and payments.

"Alerts are particularly important because almost one out of two cases of identity fraud are first detected by the individual," Van Dyke said. "It's easier for individuals to protect themselves when banks provide the

NEW YORK (AP) -- Visa, the biggest U.S. credit card network, said in a regulatory filing on Friday that it hopes to raise $10 billion in an initial public offering.

Visa said it plans to deposit a portion of the company's proceeds from the IPO into an escrow account to pay settlements or judgments related to litigation settlements.

On Wednesday, Visa disclosed that it will pay American Express Co. up to $2.07 billion to settle a lawsuit alleging the company illegally stifled competition. Under the plan, Visa said its member banks will absorb the costs of the settlement.

Despite a turbulent week on Wall Street, which ended with major drop on Friday, Visa's IPO is hotly anticipated by investors. Visa is following in the footsteps of rival MasterCard, which has more than quadrupled since the company went public in May at $39 a share.

As Wall Street struggles, MasterCard and Visa have secured the enviable role of processing the world's credit card payments but taking on none of the debt. The risk is instead held by the 25,000 banks in more than 200 countries that issue the cards.

On Oct 31, MasterCard Inc. reported that third-quarter profit jumped 63 percent, far exceeding Wall Street's expectations and driving shares to an all-time high.

Visa posted net income of $771 million on operating revenue of $3.73 billion for the nine months ended

In our previous article on the market's most overvalued stocks, we highlighted large-cap stocks that still appeared expensive, despite our opinion that the overall asset class seemed cheap. For this installment, we chose to focus on real estate. Note that this category does not include homebuilders, but rather is dominated by real estate investment trusts and other financial-services firms that focus on real estate.

Although many companies in this arena appear to be selling at a significant discount to their intrinsic values (16 of the 220 as of this writing), there are still several that trade at a premium. To parse these expensive stocks from the pack, we developed a screen to find real estate firms trading at or below 2 stars with no competitive advantages and average or greater-than-average risk. The result was seven no-moat, average-risk stocks--all of which are REITs.

Below are snippets taken from each of the Analyst Reports, spelling out the downside risks in each of these firms. As usual, we want to stress that these aren't necessarily bad companies, they are simply overvalued, in our opinion. For a more well-rounded perspective, we highly recommend reading each report in its entirety.

Seven Overvalued Stocks

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