The Sun’s Financial Diary

Bank of America is offering $0 equity trade for customers with $25,000 or more in all asset across BoA deposit accounts, including checking, savings, and CDs.
Offer available with an individual or joint Banc of America Investment Services, Inc. (BAI) Self-Directed Brokerage account. If you have a combined total of $25,000 or more in your deposit [...]

After a dismal year of 2008, the U.S. IPO market recovered a little bit in 2009. According to Renaissance Capital, there were a total of 63 deals last year, up more than a third from the year before when only 43 companies went public. To give you an idea of how bad the past two [...]

Full service broker Charles Schwab announced today (press release, PDF file) that it is reducing commission for online equity trades. Starting January 19th, Schwab customers will pay a flat $8.95 commission for each online stock trade, regardless the number of shares. The current commission schedule charges $12.95 per stock or ETF (exchange-traded fund) trade [...]

As the new year begins, many investors are looking for two things. One is an indication as to what the year ahead will bring and the second is a competitive edge to help them achieve above average returns. One thing that seasoned investors look towards to get answers to both of these questions [...]

I like the potential of investing with Lending Club, even though it means I will take a bigger risk.

It has been a long time since I last shared my Lending Club portfolio, though I have been buying notes all the time, so I think it’s due for an update.
I mentioned a few days ago that [...]

Visa (NYSE:V) stock got a big lift today after Standard & Poor announced last Friday that the payment processor, along with four other stocks, will join the benchmark after the close of trading December 18th.
I bought the stock at $59.50 a share on March 18, 2008 when it went public, despite that the economy was [...]

OptionsHouse in an online discount broker which offers investors a wide range of products and services at competitive prices. I first knew the broker in April, then opened an account for myself in June (a $1,000 account minimum is required) and made a couple of trades. The reason I wanted to trade with OptionsHouse was [...]

Today, I’d like to share with you the story of both my greatest investing success and my greatest investing mistake. Unfortunately, you’re about to find out that both stories relate to the same investment.
It was the latter half of 1999. Tech stock mania was running wild and stocks were delivering unprecedented returns. [...]

In about a month or so, your mailbox will start to get filled with year-end bank account and investment statements.
And for the first time in a while, you won’t have to cringe when you look because as a whole the market has done pretty well this year. The S&P 500 is up over 20% [...]

This is the third segment of the broker trading platform review series. So far I have covered Scottrade and Firstrade. Today, I am going to take a look at another online broker, optionsXpress. I mentioned early that, though I have an account with optionsXpress for nearly 2 years, I didn’t make any trades with optionsXpress [...]