The Sun's Financial Diary

Nearly five months ago I started to invest through Lending Club in order to add a little bit more diversification to my investments. Since then, I have been steadily building up my portfolio. The process is rather slow though since I can only buy notes on the secondary market, which I sometimes forgot to do [...]

I am a firm believer of investing in gold. Having been investing in gold since 2002 (Tocqueville Gold Fund (TGLDX) is my main vehicle to invest in gold though I have also bought a few gold coins in the past couple of years), I was pretty excited when gold broke the key $1,000/ounce mark in [...]

It has been nearly three months since I last updated my Lending Club loan portfolio, even though I wasn’t quiet during this period of time. In fact, I have already more than doubled the number of loans I own since I got into the peer-to-peer lending business in February. Right now, I have 54 notes [...]

if you are interested in having the bullion in your portfolio. 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 [...]

I have talked a lot about gold here. The reason is I am a believer that gold 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 reaching the all-time high in [...]

I logged in my Lending Club account today to buy a few more note, then I noticed something that’s apparently new in the Note Trading Platform. It’s a new column of data called (click the above screenshot to enlarge). If you are not familiar with Yield to Maturity (YTM), then you can check out the [...]

I wasted little time in building up my Lending Club portfolio. Only a few days in the peer-to-peer lending business, I already have, believe it or not, 20 loans (notes) in my portfolio 8 of them are $25 loans and the rest are $50 loans at a total value of $794.68. Right now, I don’t [...]