The Sun's Financial Diary

Are you using Lending Club? If not, then here’s your chance to win $2,500.
The popular peer-to-peer lending site is going to have its 25,000th investor some time this month. To celebrate this milestone, Lending Club announced yesterday that the 25,000th registered investor will receive a total of $2,500 cash from LC!
I started investing with Lending [...]

Popular online discount broker Zecco Trading is running a promotion which offers 20 commission free stock trades, a $90 value, to all new brokerage customers!
Zecco is one of the brokers which I have an account with and I have written about it quite frequently here (read my Zecco review and first trading experience for more [...]

I am not sure what role, if any, I had in this, but I was just informed by Shannon Paul, the Communications Manager of PEAK6 Online, the parent company of OptionsHouse, that the discount online broker has dropped the $100 cash reserve requirement (that’s different than account minimum, which is $1,000 to open an account) [...]

Apparently, I was a little overstated the status of my Lending Club loans when I updated my loan portfolio and stated that there was no late or default. Somehow, I skipped one page where there are two $50 loans that are already more than 30 days late when I checked last night, both from the [...]

I have mentioned a few time in the past that Morningstar is my primary tool when it comes to mutual fund research because, as far as I can tell, it has the broad coverage or mutual funds with the most comprehensive data of a fund. I even wrote about how to use Morningstar to research [...]

I bought my first stock nearly 8 years ago with Scottrade, which is also my first stock broker, in 2002 and one that I have been actively using since then. Throughout these years, as more and more online discount brokers emerged, I have also got accounts with other brokerage firms in order to reduce trading [...]

trade MONSTER is another online discount broker that generates quite some interests recently.
I first noticed trade MONSTER when I compiled the list of discount brokers with the lowest commissions for online stock trading. Actually, if you look at the list, trade MONSTER isn’t really attractive from the point of view of costs. The broker charges [...]

Nearly five months ago I started to invest through Lending Club in order to add a little bit more diversification to my investments. Since then, I have been steadily building up my portfolio. The process is rather slow though since I can only buy notes on the secondary market, which I sometimes forgot to do [...]

I opened an OptionsHouse brokerage account a few weeks ago after noticing that it has lowered its online stock trade commission to $2.95/trade. That price beats what I currently get from other popular discount brokers, such as TradeKing, Firstrade, and even Zecco. However, since OptionsHouse requires some paperwork (such as a signed form and voided [...]

I opened a brokerage account with optionsXpress back in 2007 when they ran a promotion that gave $100 bonus for a new account. Since then I have been running an optionsXpress referral program for people who want to receive some incentives to open an account with the broker (you can get $100 bonus, which is [...]