The Sun’s Financial Diary

Last week, I talked about CGM Focus Fund (CGMFX) and how the fund was hammered after oil prices plunged. Currently traded around $37 a barrel, crude oil prices have lost more than $100 since last July. Even though the OPEC has pledged deep cut in oil production, demands for oil were hampered as global [...]

Are you familiar with the idea of Lazy Portfolios?
I first read about Lazy Portfolios a few years on MarketWatch and since then have been following them. The idea of Lazy Portfolios is to use low-cost, index mutual funds to build well-diversified portfolios so that you can be “lazy” with your investments, without having to actively [...]

So the election is finally over.
When President-elect Obama takes the office in January, we can expect changes in policies on many fronts (if he means what he meant “Change”) and one of them could be the current administration’s energy policy, which has been criticized by many for favoring big oil companies. According to a Wall [...]

Yesterday, I posted an all-ETF portfolio that I’d like to have if I have to start all over again to build my investments. What I want to achieve with that portfolio are:

Diversification: I want to have key asset classes included in the portfolio so it will provide balanced risk-reward with relatively high growth potential;
Low cost: [...]

I like ETFs.
I bought my first ETF, PowerShares Golden Dragon USX China (PGJ), in December 2004 and since then, I have gradually added a few more exchange-traded funds to my investment portfolio, such as PGJ, PHO, and VBR. In the past, I have thought about creating an all-ETF portfolio and attempted to build model ETF [...]

So what are alternative energies?
According to Wikipedia, alternative energy sources include biomass, geothermal, solar energy, wind energy, and wave power.
In late April, Glaymore Securities launched a Solar Energy exchange-traded fund, TAN, which lets investors in solar energy providers as well as solar energy related equipment and material suppliers. Early this month, PowerShares introduced its own [...]

International ETFs, especially emerging market ETFs, have been generous to investors in the past couple of years (remember the good “old” days of high-flying Chinese stocks?). However, things turned a little bit sour since the financial crisis triggered by subprime mortgage in the summer of 2007. On surface, the trouble here in this country seems [...]

I often heard of stock splits, but this is the first time I learned splits of shares of exchanged-traded funds (anybody else has done that already?). Of course, since ETFs are traded just like stocks, the split shouldn’t be a surprise at all.
Mutual fund giant Vanguard, which is also becoming a major player in ETF, [...]

Investing in global real estate just got a little easier.
Early last month, State Street Global Advisors launched yet another global real estate ETF. The SPDR DJ Wilshire Global Real Estate ETF (RWO) is the third REIT exchange-traded fund introduced by SSgA (the other two are DJ Wilshire REIT ETF (RWR) and DJ Wilshire REIT ETF [...]

Today, April 22nd, is Earth Day and one of the topic being discussed is how to live a green life and save our environment. On this year’s Earth Day, the government also announced a plan to boost fuel efficiency by 25%, increasing per gallon mileage from 27.5 to 35.7, on the same day when the [...]