The Sun’s Financial Diary

I moved one step further in achieving a simple financial life early this week when I eliminated one fund from our mutual fund holdings, reducing the total number of funds we own to 10 (still quite a large number).
The fund got dumped was T. R. Price Emerging Europe & Mediterranean (TREMX), which I have been [...]

A couple of days ago I provided a guest article to Jeremy at Generation X Finance when he was away on a business trip. The article, Mutual Fund Distribution Explained, gives some general ideas on what kind of distributions mutual funds usually pay their investors and the tax sequences of each distribution. It also talks [...]

According to Morningstar, Buffalo Small Cap Fund (BUFSX) will re-open to new investors for a short period of time. On Buffalo Funds website, there is some more information on
Effective June 28, 2007, the Buffalo Small Cap Fund will re-open to purchases made through broker-dealers. The Fund will remain open for such purchases until the earlier [...]

In the July issue of Financial Planning magazine, there’s an article about including alternative investments such as energy, precious metal, real estate, etc, in portfolio and how they will impact the overall returns of portfolios with and without these assets. This isn’t the first time I read papers that argue the case of having commodities, [...]

but are they keeping pace with the growth of the fund assets?
Early this week, Morningstar has an article which says that the costs of owning mutual funds are declining over the past 15 years. This is definitely good news for investors who use mutual funds as investment vehicle for their future. According to the article, [...]

Late last month, Vanguard introduced simplified fee structure aimed to reduce costs on owning Vanguard funds. Though at first, it seemed that replacing $10 fee with $20 fee was going in the opposite direction of reducing investor’s cost, Vanguard does offer a couple of ways to eliminate the fee all together for good and one [...]

Sure Vanguard has some great funds with lowest expense ratio that you could find in the mutual fund industry. However, to invest with Vanguard, you would have to have a deeper pocket because most of its funds have a minimum requirement of $3,000, which essentially prevents investors with small amount of money to start investing [...]

According to Wikipedia, socially responsible investing (SRI)
describes an investment strategy which combines the intentions to maximize both financial return and social good. In general, socially responsible investors favor corporate practices which are environmentally responsible, support workplace diversity, and increase product safety and quality.
In the May issue of Financial Planning magazine, there’s a special report on [...]

Good news mutual fund investors!
Low-cost mutual fund giant Vanguard announced today that it’s simplifying its fee structure by replacing four fees with one account service fee. According to the announcement, effective April 26, 2007, the following four $10 annual fees will be eliminated:

The custodial fee on traditional IRAs, Roth IRAs, and SEP–IRAs with a balance [...]

No mutual funds are equal, even if they track the same benchmark, and this is also true for lifecycle funds.
Lifecycle funds, also known as target date funds, are getting popular among investors who seek optimum asset allocation for their retirement investments. The idea of a lifecycle fund is that the fund’s asset allocation evolves as [...]