The Sun’s Financial Diary

Seven months ago, I made part of my Zecco account a “play account” with a small amount of play money in it. For most of the stocks I purchased, I have hold them for quite a long time and have gone through the ups and downs through out the years. I am still planing to [...]

Yesterday, financial stocks led a broad rally after the government’s effort to support the mortgage market by bailing out mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Today, however, all the gains from yesterday were gone and the Wall Street was again dominated by fears of the financial sector. This time it’s Lehman Brothers (LEH)that brought down [...]

It didn’t take long for the 16 shares of Freddie Mac (FRE) that I still own with Scottrade to reach the worthless price.
I could have sold my position when the stock was at something around $1.50 the first thing in the morning, but that wouldn’t save me anything since I bought those shares at $6.26 [...]

A little more than one month ago, I bought 16 shares of Freddie Mac [[FRE]] when the share dropped nearly 50% at the opening. At that time, my thought was “How bad things could be” at these government chartered mortgage providers (Freddie and Fannie). Aren’t they too big to fail?
FRE did have a good run [...]

Do you remember when was the last time the Dow had two consecutive 200+ days?
I don’t, but that doesn’t matter because I am concerned about the stock markets now than historical performance.
After closing below 11,000 for the Dow for the first time in two year this Tuesday, the stock markets put together a nice [...]

On my way to work this morning, there was news that Fannie Mae (FNM) and Freddie Mac (FRE), two congressionally chartered mortgage agencies, were on the verge of being bailed out by the government. That was not a piece of good news, given how hard the stock markets have been hit by subprime mortgage related [...]

Yesterday, we saw the Dow made a 276-point turnaround to close the trading session with a gain of 38 points. What fueled the rally was the surprising June sales number from GM. And the turnaround actually made people speculate that the second half of 2008 may give investors a better time than the first half [...]

The last time I inserted the Dow’s intra-day chart, the benchmark dropped some 400 points. That’s was less than three weeks.
Today is another bloody day for stocks, under similar circumstance as 20 days ago:

Oil surged past $140 a barrel;
More writedowns are expected at financial firms Citigroup and Merrill Lynch;
Car makers are in deep trouble and [...]

Last November, shortly after the Dow peaked at 14,280 points, I had a post on dividend yields of the largest banks in the country. At that time, I thought that, with many bank stocks yielding 6.0% or more, buying banks make some sense if the banks can keep their dividend payouts.
That was then and we [...]

I have been using automatic purchases plans to buy most of my mutual funds for years. The date that I chose for making the monthly purchase is the 5th of the month. The reasons for selecting this date are:

I don’t want to buy funds at the end of the month because that’s the time when [...]