The Sun's Financial Diary

In the exchange-traded fund (ETF) world, things have happened fast and furious. According to an article on Financial Planning, a total of 434 ETFs were launched in 2006 and 2007. In 2008, a very bad year for stock and mutual fund investors in general, another 164 new ETFs were introduced, as financial firms try to [...]

When I discussed how to build a Lazy Portfolio with ETF last December, I mentioned that the reason why one of the Lazy Portfolios outperformed (still negative though) the S&P 500 index last year was its relatively large position is bonds, which did quite well  in 2008 comparing to equities. Now you just got more [...]

Do you watch Jim Cramer on Mad Money? Do you follow his recommendations on what to buy and sell? If so, how are those recommended stocks are doing?
Gurus like Jim Cramer and Suz Orman are often seen on TV offering their advices to audiences on where to invest their money or how to handle their [...]

Recent pricing changes at Zecco.com makes it almost impossible for small investors to trade for free. If you are looking to switching brokers, there are a few alternatives to Zecco that charge relatively low commissions for stock and option trading.
Now we know Zecco will soon be Not ZEro Commission COst for many small investors after [...]

In case you didn’t notice, the bullion has quietly made a comeback as stocks fell. On Friday, spot gold surged $22.20 (2.4%) to reach $927.20 an ounce, the six-month high (see the following chart from Market Club), after a government report showed that GDP contracted at an annual rate of 3.8% in the last quarter [...]

Zecco Trading now requires a minimum of $25,000 in the brokerage account in order to earn 10 commission free trades every month.
This is just another example to show that there’s no such thing as free lunch, if you consider free stock trades from Zecco as *free lunch*. Since the launch in July 2006, Zecco, which [...]

Do you know what Fibonacci rule is?
Basically, Fibonacci sequence is a sequence of numbers in which each successive number is equal to the sum of the two preceding numbers, such as 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, . . . The rule used to generated Fibonacci sequence is called Fibonacci rule, which can be [...]

When I need to check some data, such as returns and historical prices, of stocks or mutual funds, I usually use free tools such as Yahoo Finance or Morningstar. For my simple needs, those tools are enough, though what they offer are quite limited.
INO Free Stock Analysis
Recently I was informed about another free stock analysis [...]

Looks like the Wall Street doesn’t have too much confidence in Barack Obama. Why?
The day after he won the presidential election, November 5, 2008, the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 486 points. Today, the day Obama was sworn in as the 44th President of the county, the Dow tumbled 332 points, the worst inauguration day [...]

It has been more than a year since I last ran a comparison between my actively managed funds and low-cost Vanguard index funds. After the huge losses in stock markets last year, I am more interested in seeing how my funds have performed in 2008 and how they compared against Vanguard funds. To compare, I [...]