The Sun's Financial Diary

This is the second part of the Invest in Gold series. In the first part, I compared several gold dealers, mainly from the angle of price (price of the gold, shipping fees, and insurance charges), and the direct outcome of that research was the purchase of a gold coin myself last week from Bullion Direct.
During [...]

This is not a book review, but rather from an article I read yesterday on SmartMoney.com.
The article, “John Bogle Says ETFs a Mistake for Many Investors,” cited Mr. Bogle, founder of Vanguard and pioneer of index mutual funds, as saying that with a flood of new ETF offerings, investors are “performance-chasing” by investing in ETFs [...]

1. Boost my 4-week T-bill purchases from $12,000 a month to $24,000 a month.
The latest T-bill rate (March 1, 2007) is 5.267% APR, equivalent to a 5.40% APY. Considering that the interests earned from T-bill investment are exempted from state income taxes, the effective annual yield is as high as 5.77%, a rate that [...]

I finally did today what I have long been considering doing: Buy gold. Today the waiting is officially over after I bought an one ounce American Buffalo gold coin from Bullion Direct, at the time when recent selling pressure has pushed the spot gold price from a nine-month high of $689 reached early this week [...]

SmartMoney.com recently has an article which provides some model portfolios for investors who consider taking the all-ETF approach in building their portfolios. The article, titled “Ready for an All-ETF Portfolio? Here Are Some Models,” starts by making the arguments of under what circumstances an investor is better off to stay with the traditional index mutual [...]

A big sell-off as the one we witnessed yesterday always presents a buying opportunity, though for long-term investment, one-day drop won’t mean too much. That being said, when you are ready to invest, why buy high and you can buy low?
This morning when I logged in my Firstrade account, I noticed that the fund I [...]

Well, this is the worst day I ever had in my not-so-long investment life. More than $15,000 on paper are gone in one day, with the worst being all China related issues: GRRF, -$1.40 (10.17%), PGJ, -$2.10 (9.62%), and LFC, -3.72 (8.82%). The smallest decliners are PEY, -$0.44, 2.88% and OAKBX, -$0.43, 1.61%. The break [...]

IPOhome.com has reported that Xinhua Finance Media has filed for an initial public offering with SEC on February 21, 2007. According to the SEC filing, the company will offer 23 million American depositary shares (ADSs) in the IPO, priced between $12 to $14 per ADS. The business of Xinhua Fiance Media currently “focuses on business [...]

I have long been considering some consolidations of my regular mutual fund investments. What prompted me for making the change was that some funds in my collection (I currently have twelve of them) have seen some dramatic style shifts in recent years and, therefore, no longer meet the overall investment objective. After a recent portfolio [...]

This is the second part of the Model Portfolio Built with ETFs series, which convert Jonathan’s Model Portfolios into all-ETF portfolios. In this part (the first part can be found here), I looked at the four example portfolios in The Bogleheads’ Guide to Investing [Amazon.com affiliate link] and examined ways to reconstruct these portfolios [...]