Investing
IPOs on Deck: Rosetta Stone (RST) and Bridgepoint Education (BPI)
The U.S. IPO market is pretty much dried up. In 2008, a total of 43 companies went public, only 8 in the second half of the year, according to a report from Renaissance Capital, as the crisis in the financial market forced companies abandon plans to go public. So far in 2009, only 2 initial [...]
How Long Does It Take Your Broker to Answer Your Call?
I am sure you have called your broker on occasions when you had a problem with your account. Usually, how long did it take for your broker to answer your phone call? Were you be able to talk to a broker when you needed immediate assistance with your trades?
I have a few brokerage accounts and [...]
Vanguard Launched FTSE All-World ex-US Small-Cap ETF
Mutual fund giant Vanguard Group launched a new exchanged-traded fund (ETF) last week. The Vanguard FTSE All-World ex-US Small-Cap ETF (VSS), incepted on April 2, tracks the performance of the FTSE Global Small-Cap ex-US Index. According to FTSE, the Global Small-Cap ex-US Index is a freefloat-adjusted, market-capitalization-weighted index that covers more than 3,300 small-cap stocks [...]
Zecco Introduced New Services
I haven’t used Zecco for a long time, especially after they introduced the new pricing structure , which requires $25,000 account minimum or 25 trades every month in order to get 10 commission free trades per month, early this year. All my recent trades were done with Scottrade, using free trades I neared from the [...]
Treasury Extended Money Market Funds Guarantee
Last September, shortly after The Reserve Primary Fund broke the buck, the Treasury Department introduced a plan to provide temporary guarantee to money market mutual funds. The original plan was to use $50 billion from the Exchange Stabilization Fund to guarantee principal in money market mutual funds, which by design has the NAV of $1, [...]
Individual Country ETF First Quarter Performances
The first quarter of 2009 is in the books. Thanks to the strong rally in the second half of March, the U.S. stock market ended the month on the positive note, even though it wasn’t enough the pull the market out of the red for the quarter. For the quarter, the S&P 500 Index lost [...]
Are Vanguard Mutual Funds Getting Expensive?
Early this year, I compared performance of actively managed funds in my portfolio against some Vanguard index funds. In addition to the fund returns in 2008, which are all quite different between the two group of funds (four out ten funds beat Vanguard while the other six lagged), another thing I noticed from the comparison [...]
Is S&P 500 Recent Rally Real?
Last weekend, I shared a video from INO which examined the rally of the Dow Jones Industrial Average occurred in the past couple of weeks and concluded that it was just a temporary bounce in a down market.
This week, INO released another educational video for its take on the recent gains of the S&P 500, [...]
Benjamin Graham’s Three Principles of Value Investing
Have you read The Intelligent Investor and Security Analysis by Benjamin Graham? These two books are considered as must read for value investing, but they are all pretty heavy books, especially the Security Analysis. If you just want to grab the essentials of the books, then there’s on article on Forbes about Graham’s three timeless [...]
A Few Options to Invest in Gold
if you are interested in having the bullion in your portfolio, of course.
ETFs
This is probably the easiest way to invest in precious metals, gold and silver. There are some several precious metal ETFs available as I discussed in my previous post. Among them, two are very popular: SPDR Gold Shares (GLD) and iShares Silver Trust [...]
