MOST NOTEWORTHY: BP PLC, Wells Fargo and Hibbett Sports were today's noteworthy downgrades:

• Lehman downgraded shares of BP PLC (NYSE:BP) to Underweight from Equal Weight to reflect a lower share of profitability from the Azeri field in Azerbaijan.
  
• Friedman Billings downgraded Wells Fargo (NYSE:WFC) to Underperform from Market Perform citing its consumer exposure and recent indications of consumer credit quality deterioration.
  
• The firm also downgraded Hibbett Sports (NASDAQ:HIBB) to Market Perform from Outperform following the company's Q4 pre-announcement.

OTHER DOWNGRADES:

• Coca-Cola HBC SA (NYSE:CCH) was downgraded to Neutral from Buy at Merrill.
  
• Goldman removed Weatherford (NYSE:WFT) from its Conviction Buy List and downgraded Foot Locker (NYSE:FL) to Sell from Neutral.

There are good reasons to hand your money over to a bank, financial planner, or mutual fund, and there are bad reasons. Low costs and a strong record of sound management would be good reasons. A recent hot-streak or sexy advertising may be bad reasons. But then there are really bad reasons, and I would put a company's aptitude at genealogical research into that category.

According to a recent piece in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required), Wells Fargo (NYSE: WFC) is trying to seal the deal with wealthy prospects by offering the services of genealogist Andy Anderson, the bank's corporate historian. According to the article, "In recent years, the former Stanford University history fellow has turned genealogical research into an unusual marketing vehicle: After Dr. Anderson taps into rich families' fascination with their forebears, the bank aims to turn them into customers for its private-banking arm. By Wells Fargo's estimate, Dr. Anderson has had a hand in developing relationships that have led to $1 billion in new assets for the bank."

I don't even really know what to say. But next time a bank offers you nice perks, ask yourself this: How much money is the bank going to be making from my account if it can afford to deploy a Stanford history fellow to research my ancestors?

Any bank that can provide that service probably is not the lowest-cost option, which is really important when it comes to money management.

So we saw this market "rebound" nicely on Wednesday, so we are out of the woods, right? Maybe, but not quite. Let's look at the data beneath the data and see where the money flowed on Wednesday. It may reveal a bit more.

On Wednesday the NASDAQ traded 2.7 billion shares, while the New York Stock Exchange traded 3.9 billion shares. The NYSE saw advance /declines at almost 2 to 1, while the NASDAQ was pretty even at 1,663 issues advancing and 1,394 issues declining. This dichotomy is not unusual. Why would the NYSE see 2 to 1 advance/decline, while the NASDAQ saw nearly one to one?

The reason is the flight to safety or the flight to defensive names. Whether this flight is temporary or stretched out further, it will probably continue at least for Thursday and Friday. Many individual investors and professional portfolio managers that were sitting on a profit with a NASDAQ stock may be aggressively taking that profit. It's basically a strategy of shoot first, ask questions later.

In the meantime, proceeds from profitable holdings in NASDAQ stock(s) are being rolled into the financials like Bank of America(NYSE:BAC), Wells Fargo (NYSE:WFC) and the like. Big dividend paying stocks with solid coverage of those dividends are very popular. I wrote about the attractiveness of many of these names in an earlier article. One important factor to examine as an individual investor is buy stocks that pay a healthy dividend but can also show earnings growth as well.

The next two days will tell us a lot about the direction and the flow of funds in this market by watching the advance/decline ratio closely. This reveals the data behind the data.

Georges Yared is the author of "Stop Losing Money Today" and "Baby Boomer Investing...Where do we go from here?" For more info please visit http://www.georgesyared.com