The Sun's Financial Diary

As 2007 comes to an conclusion, I make another change of my investment accounts over the weekend when I opened a TradeKing account, which will replace Firstrade as my main stock broker for stocks that pay dividend. I got the Firstrade account in early 2006, mainly for its free dividend reinvestment feature, one that my [...]

An email from ShareBuilder reached my mailbox tonight with some “exciting” announcement: ShareBuilder has been acquired by ING Direct on November 15, 2007. Along with the announcement, ShareBuilder also told its customers what change they can expect after the transaction: none. Rest assured there have been no changes made to your ShareBuilder account. All of [...]

As E-Trade’s stock bounced back to $5+ level, it seems the bankruptcy rumor has calmed down a little bit. Actually, instead of going out of business, E-Trade may become a take-over target (that speculation played a big role in driving up the stock price). Anyway, today I received an email from E-Trade regarding my account [...]

Another big story yesterday (the other one I thought was the 170+ points reversal of the Dow, extending the index’s losing streak to 4 and closing below 13,000 the first time since late August) was the nearly 60% drop of E-Trade Financial shares. Following a Citigroup analyst downgrade of the stock to Sell over the [...]

Last week, when I went through Kiplinger’s 2007 Best List, one of the surprises to me was their choice of the best online broker for fund investors, which went to Muriel Siebert, a broker that I have never heard of until I read the magazine. Kiplinger gave a brief explanation why this particular broker won [...]

I am currently using several brokerage accounts and each of them has its own *unique* features. For example, I use Firstrade for stocks that pays dividend (such as MO), but it charges $6.95 per trade, E-Trade for stocks listed in Hong Kong, and QQQDirect to buy QQQQ without commission (find out more in my brokerage [...]

It seems to me that Zecco doesn’t have a clear plan on how to run their business. First, they asked a ton of paperwork to open an account, then ran a promotion with a lowered minimum requirement that didn’t want anybody to know, shortly after the secret promotion, they decided to get rid of all [...]

I have been considering an E-Trade Global Trading account for quite some time. I thought it’s a good idea to invest directly into foreign markets, in addition to buying ADRs that are listed on US markets. What held me back is the high cost of trading foreign stocks. However, I still want to try that [...]