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Welcome to the Daily 5, our "Foolish" look at the business news you can use.

Banks look like the worst stocks in the world right now. Shares of Wachovia (NYSE: WB), Washington Mutual (NYSE: WM), and National City (NYSE: NCC) are in tatters. Not even Bank of America (NYSE: BAC) can get a salute. (Well, maybe one kind of salute.) Will your bank be next? Here are five ways to know if your thrift is the next IndyMac . Drum roll, please:

Thursday morning, waaaaay before the markets here open, Finnish mobile phone mogul Nokia (NYSE: NOK) reports second-quarter earnings. Check out fellow Fool Tim Beyers' take on the first-quarter report before you get back to this update -- which has a much happier ending.

With so much upheaval in the mobile device market surrounding the Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) iPhone, it's hard to believe the iconic device has been around scarcely more than a year. While the first two generations of the device have now been picked apart and analyzed in great detail for investment opportunities, I still think the big money is located in the long-term potential of Apple's new platform.

I recently found this chart from the ever-helpful moneychimp.com:

How did Apple do it? My son asked me for an iPod for his birthday. I figured he meant he wanted an MP3 player of any type, and I asked him if he wanted to try a Zune or maybe another PC-based player. "Oh, no, Dad," he said in response. "It has to be an iPod."

Good news for gizmo freaks! The much awaited newer, better and cheaper version of iPhone shoots on sale Friday morning bringing an ecstasy to the iPhone enthusiasts.

Virtual reality is becoming more real every day. We're still light years away from the "Metaverse" virtual worlds from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash -- but several technology behemoths are taking baby steps in that direction as we speak.

Toyota Prius plans to launch the new hybrid third version in 2010 which would use solar energy to run the air conditioning system of the car.

We're now 17 months into the courtship between XM Satellite Radio (Nasdaq: XMSR) and Sirius Satellite Radio (Nasdaq: SIRI), but it's hard to tell whether the church bells signal a wedding or a funeral.

I could write this article the usual way -- by showing you how to turn your thousands into millions through investments in solid, growing, well-known companies. Both Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) and Walgreen (NYSE: WAG), for example, have returned an average of 16% annually over the past 20 years. Not too shabby.

Beijing -- "Kung Fu Panda" enjoyed a successful first week of release in China despite a protest aimed at keeping the U.S. film out of the country, gate figures show.

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to switch my Internet and phone from Verizon (NYSE: VZ) to Comcast (Nasdaq: CMCSA). To make a long story short, my living room's status quo changed quickly, since this change meant that my TiVo (Nasdaq: TIVO) could no longer use my phone line to download its program data. (This was a big, fat bummer when my TiVo informed me that it had just one day left of data. Oh, the horror.)

Just when you thought buyers might be revving up for summer by driving new sets of wheels off car dealers' lots, up went oil prices. Between that and an otherwise soft economy, June car sales found "R" for reverse, hitting their lowest level in more than a decade.