Investing
If You’re Coming from Saving Bond Advisor
I'd like to take this opportunity to welcome you to my diary and hope you find the information in my post "T-Bill Investment Rate: Is it APR or APY? And What Is Your Taxable Equivalent Yield?" useful. I will be very happy if the post, written with my best knowledge, can help you understand some [...]
How to be Successful in Investing from Kiplinger — Part II
The second key for you to be a successful investor is to Set Exciting Goals, whether they are short-term, medium-term, or long-terms goals.
If you visit any PF blogger's website and go through the posts, chances are you will see some personal goals. Some are as small as making a commitment when you starts a [...]
T-Bill Investment Rate: Is it APR or APY? And What Is Your Taxable Equivalent Yield?
If you go to TreasuryDirect’s website and check the latest T-Bill rates, you will find a table with the following seven columns: Security Term, Issue Date, Maturity Date, Discount Rate %, Investment Rate %, Price Per $100, and CUSIP. As a 4-Week T-bill investor, when I look at the table, the single item that concerns [...]
4-Week T-Bill Rate Kept Rising
The lastest 4-Week T-bill rate from last Tuesday's auction is 5.176%, already surpassing interest rates offered from some popular banks, such as EmigrantDirect and HSBC, which earn you 5.05% APY.
If you want to get some other alternatives for your cash reserve, you may want to consider E-Loan, which has a very appealing 5.50% APY and [...]
What You Want to Know Before Buying ETFs
In my previous post, I summarized the reasons I invested in ETFs (I currently have six PowerShares ETFs: PEY, PFM, PGJ, PHO, and PID), including
ETFs are priced as stocks;
Many ETFs are designed to track some popular indices;
The fees for sector ETFs are usually lower than their mutual fund counterparts;
ETFs can be purchased at any discount [...]
How to be Successful in Investing from Kiplinger — Part I
Kiplinger's Personal Finance has an on-going special series on successful investing. Today, the first segment of the "The Five Keys to Investing Success" is out and key number one is Make Investing a Habit, a principle that I couldn't agree more.
The article begins with a suggestion to people with small amount to invest every [...]
4-Week T-Bills: Back into Action and How to Make a Purchase
This week's auction result put the interest rate of 4-week T-Bills at 5.146%, better than what EmigrantDirect and HSBC offer (5%). For second straight week, the rates are above 5%, making T-Bills more attractive now than a month ago. And I decided to jump back in again. Well, considering that I have only canceled the [...]
Dollar-cost-averaging with ETFs: Bad Idea?
I became a big fan of ETFs (Exchange Traded Funds) in December 2004 when I sold my Matthews China Fund (MCHFX) holdings at Scottrade after it started to charge fees for no-load mutual funds and switched to PowerShares' Golden Dragon Halter USX China (PGJ), 10 days after its inception.
Now I own seven PowerShares ETFs, [...]
How often Do You Check Your Investment Accounts’ Balance?
Every day? Every week? or Every month?
When I first started investing in 2001, I was so eager to see how my investments (mutual funds) were doing, I just couldn't wait till 6 o'clock in the eventing to get the closing prices. So I entered the top 10 or 15 holdings of each mutual funds I [...]
Sent Checks to Scottrade
Due to the apparent delay of our Roth IRA transfer process at Vanguard, I decided to mail the checks ($1000 each) to Scottrade for our forth quarter Roth IRA contributions. When I started the transfer process at the end of last month, I thought it could be done before the next quarterly automatic investment date [...]
