The Sun’s Financial Diary

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 [...]

Lending Club, the only SEC registered peer-to-peer lending site, today announced the introduction of the first ever self-directed IRA to let lenders save for retirements through P2P lending. The new self-directed IRA accounts are managed by EntrustCAMA, a custodian of both self-directed and real estate IRAs.
Currently, Lending Club self-directed IRA plan participants can choose to [...]

One of the two funds in my mutual fund portfolio that I don’t buy regularly is Third Avenue Estate Value Fund (TAREX), though I have owned this fund for years (the other one is Tocqueville Gold (TGLDX), but I bought TGLDX more often). When I first bought TAREX, the initial minimum investment was something like [...]

This is a comment left by nt on my post on Citi stock purchase:
I heard that citi group is reverse splitting the shares. Is this good for the investors?
Before talking about what a reverse stock split is, here’s a story of one stock I used to own which did a reverse stock split in the [...]

Since closing at 6,547.05 on March 9th, the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained back more than 11% in the past 9 trading sessions to recoup some of the losses. The rally was partly fueled by financial stocks after two of the nation’s three largest banks, Bank of America (BAC) and Citigroup (C), made bullish comments [...]

I have talked a lot about gold here. The reason is I am a believer that gold, not physical gold though, should have a place in the portfolio, not exactly for hedging against information but for diversification. Take a look at the performance of the stock market and gold since 2007, for instance. After [...]

I mentioned early this month that I bought 600 shares of Citigroup (C) on the day when the stock was traded below $1 for the first time ever. From where the stock is traded now (it closed at $3.08/share on March 18, 2009), it seems that my bet is a good one, even though I [...]

Firstrade, one of the popular discount online brokers, is offering incentives to people who join and participate in their newly launched online community, The Investor Network.

Details of incentives being offered are as the following:
Firstrade is very pleased to announce the launch of a promotion on The Investor Network. We’ll be giving an Apple iPod Nano [...]

The economic crisis around world has put China under the spotlight. The world’s third largest economy, who also holds nearly $2 trillion in foreign exchange reserve, has started to use its nearly $600 stimulus package to revive its economy, building highways and railroads, investing in educations, and improving social welfare. While banks in the U.S. [...]

Did you trade stocks or ETF/mutual funds in 2008? If you did, do you find it’s sometimes confusing about your investment cost basis,  taxes on capital gains, or capital losses carry-over? It wasn’t easy for me at tax time a few years ago when I first started to trade stocks while using pen & paper [...]