The Sun’s Financial Diary

Are you investing in quality, dividend paying stocks, either by buying individual stocks or investing in dividend oriented mutual funds or ETFs (exchange traded funds)?
Why Invest in Dividend Stocks?
If you are not, then I ask you to take a look at this chart from the S&P. It’s the cumulative return of $1 invested in 1930 [...]

With the stock market as volatile as it can be, I decided to take advantage of stocks’ slump recently to make a few quick bucks. I had a “play account” at Zecco to make speculative stock purchase (sadly, that account is close to nothing right now), but this time I am using Scottrade instead because [...]

A month ago, I wrote a post on asset allocation where I discussed the importance of having a diversified portfolio that consists of various asset classes. The reason for doing that is quite simple: as we have long believed, diversification can mitigate risks.
When I was building my virtual all-ETF portfolio a while ago, I had [...]

The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed below the 8,000 point mark for the first time since nearly 6 years on Wednesday, November 19, 2008 after dropping 427.47 points to close at 7,997.28 points. The last time the index closed blow 8,000 points was March 31, 2003.

It took the index four and half years to reach [...]

Just a quick note.
If you want to use ShareBuilder (my ShareBuilder review) to open a custodial or educational savings account, you can get 3 free real time trades when using promotion code 3FREETRADES. This offer is only good for educational savings account and can’t be used in regular brokerage account as well. Currently, ShareBuilder charges [...]

So it has been five years since China Life Insurance (LFC) IPOed on NYSE, which means I have own this stock for exactly five years, the longest time I have ever owned a stock. That sounds unbelievable to me. Time did pass very quickly

It wasn’t a smooth ride however. When I bought the [...]

I heard the news this morning that Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit bought 750,000 shares of Citigroup stock (C) on the open market yesterday when the share price dropped below $9. In addition to CEO Pandit, other three executives also bought a total of 550,000 shares. Is this the sign of confidence?
Currently trading slightly above $9 [...]

What a huge difference one day can make!
Yesterday, when the election was still underway, investors, in anticipation of a Obama victory, pushed the Dow up nearly 305 points, the biggest gain ever on an election day.
Today, even before excitement from Obama’s historic win started to fade, investors re-focused their attention on the economy, instead of [...]

As an investor, I felt a little relieved when October is finally over, especially when all three major indices closed the month with two consecutive gains, which is a rare event these days. What is not rare the past month are the huge ups and downs of the indices, especially the Dow Jones Industrial Average.  [...]

In early September, I put up a post on the new Scottrade 3 commission free trades promotion. Because I have been a loyal Scottrade customer for many years and generally quite happy with their service, I wanted to share the promotion with everybody so people can save some money on commissions if they want to [...]