The Sun's Financial Diary

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 [...]

Are you still interested in ShareBuilder? If you are, then you can get $25 bonus when opening a new account. This offer is only good for joint, individual and custodial accounts, not for IRA or ESA accounts. The bonus will be credited to your new account within four to six weeks after the first transaction [...]

Recent pricing changes at Zecco.com makes it almost impossible for small investors to trade for free. If you are looking to switching brokers, there are a few alternatives to Zecco that charge relatively low commissions for stock and option trading. Now we know Zecco will soon be Not ZEro Commission COst for many small investors [...]

Zecco Trading now requires a minimum of $25,000 in the brokerage account in order to earn 10 commission free trades every month. This is just another example to show that there’s no such thing as free lunch, if you consider free stock trades from Zecco as *free lunch*. Since the launch in July 2006, Zecco, [...]

It seems that TradeKing (check out TradeKing reviews and interview with CEO Montarano for more on TradeKing) has made some changes on their ACH policy. I first saw the discussion on FatWallet forum early last week about TradeKing’s increased ACH period. At that time, the ACH deposit policy looks like this: ACH Deposits – 5 [...]

Early this week, I had an unpleasant experience with Zecco when I was charged $4.50 commission when buying a few shares of CSUN. What I was upset is the commission itself. I pay more than $4.50 commission with other brokers (Scottrade $7.0 and TradeKing $4.95). I was unhappy about how it happened: The order went [...]

Yesterday, I used my play money at Zecco to buy 66 shares of China Sunergy (CSUN). The purchase price was $3.29 and at the moment when I bought the stock, I had $221 cash in my account, enough to make the purchase which was valued at $217.14. The order went through, as it was supposed. [...]

When I logged into my ING Direct account this morning, I noticed a new function that I didn’t remember a couple of weeks ago when I checked my account last time: The function to allow you to view your ShareBuilder brokerage account right from ING Direct. Actually, I think this function is kind of overdue [...]