The Sun’s Financial Diary

All my efforts were wasted as November 6th came and went and my money is still sitting in my E-Trade account.
Last night I logged into my account and tried to see if I could buy 1688.HK when the stock was at HK$29.90 though I knew it was almost impossible because of the rule. And indeed [...]

Chinese stocks, especially IPO stocks, are as hot as they can be, thanks to the growing appetite among investors who look Chinese stocks as a proxy to tap into Chinese economy, which is still growing at a sizzling 11.5% in the latest quarter despite measures introduced by the government to cool it off. And an [...]

In November 2004, I bought 200 shares of Microsoft. The purchase was to add some tech stocks to my investments as I had only one tech stock (Taiwan Semiconductor) and none of my mutual funds were heavy in technology companies. Though Microsoft was no longer a high-fly stock as it used to be at that [...]

I have been keeping my expectation high for the upcoming Alibaba IPO on Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Got an E-Trade Global Trading account and transferred a substantial amount of money (to me) in hoping to get a piece of it when the stock begins trading on November 6th in Hong Kong. Now it seems I [...]

The first time I heard that Alibaba.com was planning for an initial share sale this year was in 2005 when Baidu.com went public. Since then, I have been following news about Alibaba.com’s initial public offering with a lot of interests because I knew I want a piece of it (maybe I should have bought some [...]

It feels like it was just yesterday that lot of *advices* were floating around in the personal finance blog community on how you should get out of the markets if the 1000+ points drop of the Dow (the Dow as 14,000 on July 19 and 12,845 on August 16) made you sweating and get up [...]

Yesterday, there was an article on Money.com by Jason Zweig, editor of the revised book, The Intelligent Investor, that I think is an excellent reading. The article, Are You a Better Investor?, has some good advises on what it means to be a better investor.Mr. Zweig started the article with some examples of what [...]

It was just a week ago I was troubled by the steep decline of China Life Insurance (LFC) after the stock lost more than $12 in two weeks. Sure the market was cooperating during that time period when everything was down, but the more than 18% drop was a little bit scary. Then just as [...]

On August 14, 2007, Berkshire Hathaway filed with SEC its second quarter Form 13F. For the quarter ending June 30, 2007, Berkshire reported 40 stock holdings in its portfolio, including

American Express (AXP)
American Standard Cos. (ASD)
Ameriprise Financial (AMP)
Anheuser-Busch (BUD)
Bank of America (BAC)
Burlington Northern (BNI)
Coca-Cola (KO)
Comcast CMCSA (CMCSK)
Comdisco (CDCO)
ConocoPhillips (COP)
Costco Wholesale (COST)
Dow Jones (DJ)
First Data (FDC)
Gannett (GCI)
General [...]

There is an article in New York Time today with the title “Small Investors Feel Less Pain as Stocks Slide” (registration may be required). The main theme of the article can be summarized by this paragraph:
The excesses in the financial markets are now generally believed to reside in complex mortgage securities and other esoteric investments, [...]