Investing in the stock market can be tricky, heck investing in general is tricky.� But one area of investing that I’ve found people to have more than average confusion over is the bond market. Many people just don’t understand bonds and that might be because of the math that’s involved in calculating their value. There is a strange inverse relation to price and yield that confuses the heck out of most individual investors.

I will be the first person to tell you that investing in the stock market is really really hard. Many speculators will have you believe that investing can be easy; that you can just push a few buttons on your computer to pick a few stocks and make a bunch of money, but I think we both know better than that! Some people think that investing in bonds is a safer bet than investing in the stock market; and for the most part, they are right.

Investing in the stock market is one of the hardest things that most people will ever do in their life. Because of this, it seems like we’re always looking for better ways to make money investing. One of those better ways to make money is by investing in stripped municipals.

Robert Errico, head of member regulation at the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority Inc., will be leaving the organization at the end of March. Mr. Errico was responsible for ongoing surveillance and annual examinations of broker-dealer firms.

S hoppers Drug Mart Corp. SC-T raised its quarterly dividend Thursday, and said it sees new store openings boosting sales, as it reported fourth-quarter results that narrowly missed market expectations. Shoppers, Canada’s biggest pharmacy chain, said it expects overall sales to grow modestly this year as it adds between 105 and 115 new stores to its nationwide chain of 1,291.

T oday’s top stories from Report on Business : EU pledges support for Greece Stocks rose but the euro fell today after EU leaders meeting in Brussels pledged to support Greece as its debt crisis mounts. Markets were watching the economic summit closely for word on a bailout package, which didn’t materialize in any concrete form as there were no details to the EU promise.