The Sun's Financial Diary

If you are a mutual fund investor, chances are you have seen Morningstar’s star rating every where, on fund family’s website, on Yahoo! Finance (where you can find a comprehensive list of funds and fund families), even on funds’ ads. Common sense tells us a fund with five stars should outperform a two-star fund, the [...]

Good news for dividend investors. Morningstar.com reported today that Vangurad will launch Vanguard High Dividend Yield Index Fund in the fourth quarter of this year. The fund, which tracks FTSE High Dividend Yield Index, will also be available in ETF shares. The mutual fund will have an expense ratio of 0.40%.

BUFSX has been part of my taxable investment portfolio since the beginning of 2002 when I started to invest. Since then, I have been dollar-cost-averaging $100 into this fund every month and the fund’s return was superior: 51.2% in 2003 and 28.8% in 2004 according to Morningstar.
However, the fund started to lag not only [...]

I owned Vanguard Wellington Fund in my IRA account with Scottrade since 2001 and I am very happy with the fund’s performance. The only problem I have is Scottrade.
I have both my taxable account and retirement account with Scottrade for more than five years, and they used to be very good: low fee, online [...]