The Sun's Financial Diary

OptionsHouse is one of the discount brokers that I have an account with.
I opened the account in June when I found that it charges only $2.95 per stock trade, much less than other brokers I use (Zecco offers free trade, but the requirement is rather high for small investors). However, it disappointed me when I [...]

The stock is down pretty badly so far today. For some investors,  this is an opportunity to buy stocks at a better price, given that the market was down four out of the six trading sessions. Suppose that you see a stock that you have wanted to buy and today it finally reaches the price [...]

Prosper, one of the earliest players in peer-to-peer lending, was quite last year and early this year because it failed to meet regulatory requirements. It wasn’t allowed to keep operating until it was cleared by the SEC. Its chief rival Lending Club, on the other hand, was quick to get the OK from the regulator [...]

The bank itself may be not, but its parent, GMAC Financial Services, is certainly in a situation no bank wants to be in.
News came out this morning that GMAC, the recipient of billions of dollars of taxpayer money since last December, is going back to the government to ask for more money. That would be [...]

I took advantage of an early bonus offer for ING Direct Business Savings Account last month and got an account for myself plus $50 bonus from the one-time offer What I like about the account is not only the decent yield (currently at 1.15% APY) of the Business Savings Account, but also the [...]

In my post over the weekend, I took a quick look at Lending Club’s new statistics page. The improved web page offers potential lenders a range of tools to evaluate the overall performance and risk of lending money through Lending Club. In addition to statistics provided by LC, you can also download raw data from [...]

Sottrade is a online discount stock broker which offers investors, from big to small, a wide range of products and trading tools at a competitive price.
One of the online discount stock brokers I use very actively is Scottrade. When I first selected Scottrade as my broker 7 years, I didn’t not much about it other [...]

Now you can earn Membership Rewards Points even faster with the American Express Premier Rewards Gold Card. The new card allows you to buy the things you need and get rewarded with the things you want at the same time.
Membership Rewards
Here’s how it works. With the AMEX Premier Rewards Gold Card, you can earn points [...]

One of the biggest challenges when investing through social lending platforms such as Lending Club is evaluating loans to minimize, but not totally avoid, risks involved in lending money to total strangers. It’s not an easy task because, though Lending Club does its job to collect and verify the data,  there’s just some much information [...]

I recently came across a website called Wokai.org. You may not familiar with the name (it’s the first time I knew it as well), but what they are doing shouldn’t be strange to you, if you know what Kiva is.
That’s right. Wokai is a charitable organization that microfinances small businesses,  just like what they do [...]