The Sun's Financial Diary

In the third part of the 2007 Consumer Reports Ultimate Money Guide, a method was provided by the magazine on how to beat the broad market index, which is repeated in the following:

No-load: Look at no-load funds only.
Low-fee: Identify those with lowest expense ratios.
High-asset: Keep those with the most assets under management.
Long-tenure: Get rid of [...]

Early this month, there’s an article on Morningstar.com discussing the allocation of stocks and bonds in an investment portfolio. Determining the right mix of stocks and bonds depends on many factors, such as age, risk tolerance, and return expectation. For aggressive investors with longer time horizon, they can afford to put a large port of [...]

I have a previous post that compared my actively managed funds against Vanguard funds for a 5-year period that covered most of the time I invested in those funds. The purpose of the post was to have an idea whether actively managed funds, while costing a little more to own, indeed lagged low-cost index funds [...]

I am a big fan of small-cap funds. At one time, I had several small-cap funds, both value and growth, in my taxable investment accounts. Though I have trimmed the number to two, they are still a significant portion of my portfolio as small-cap is nearly a quarter of my taxable mutual fund investments.
The reason [...]

For quite some time, Dodge & Cox International Fund (DODFX) was the top performer in our mutual fund investments. Less than two months ago, our investments in the fund have returned more than 100%. However, the market downturn since then has eroded some of the gains. Now the overall return of this fund is down [...]

There are sellers, there are buyers, and there are investors doing nothing. In this stormy market, who are you?
I think I belong to the third group with a little bit buy activities. Rather than seeing the current market as the prelude of a recession as some have predicted, I treat the month-long decline as [...]

Several years ago, I invested in a mutual fund called Arbitrage Fund (ARBFX) for a short period of time (less than two years). The reason for me to get into this fund was that the fund’s investment strategy is different from any other funds I invested in and I was looking for an investment with [...]

Unlike our taxable investments which consist of quite a large number of mutual funds, ETFs, and stocks, I try to maintain a small number of funds in our IRA accounts and use mostly Vanguard index funds to keep the expenses low. Among the total of 10 funds in our IRA investments, we own Vanguard Total [...]

As I stated before, my investment objective is to generate passive incomes from investments. To reach that goal, I am trying to build a portfolio with dividend-paying stocks and mutual funds/ETFs. Among my dividend generators, one that I particularly like is Alpine Dynamic Dividend Fund (ADVDX). I started investing in ADVDX in April 2006 [...]

have doubled
When I checked with Quicken last night, I found that our investments in Dodge & Cox International Fund (DODFX) have gained 100%, the first fund in my collection that has posted triple digits return.
I purchased my first share of DODFX on June 9, 2003 at $17.41. Since then, I have been making [...]