The Sun's Financial Diary

It looks like buying ETFs without commission is getting a lot easier these days. Late last week, Charles Schwab, the brokerage firm that introduced no-transaction fee mutual fund supermarket 20 years ago, announced the creation of the equivlant of ETF supermarket, called Schwab ETF OneSource. The online ETF trading platform allows Schwab customers to buy [...]

Update: Last week I wrote about how you can buy ETFs without paying any commission and in the article, I listed Scottrade as one of the brokers which currently offers commission-free ETFs to its customers. The information I had in the article about Scottrade ETFs was from the March 2011 Scottrade announcement when those commission-free ETFs [...]

“Can I buy and sell ETFs without paying any commission fee?” Yes, you can. Actually, you don’t need to have a lot of money to trade exchange-traded funds (ETFs) for free these days and your choices of where to get commission-free ETFs are plenty. As Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) continue to gain popularity among cost-conscious [...]

I have always wanted to build a portfolio consisting of dividend-paying stocks that could generate passive income for us in the long term. The plan is to continuously investing in stocks with high dividend yield such that distributions from the portfolio will someday make up a significant portion of our income when we can no [...]

Competition is always good because it gives us more choices. As we have witnessed in the brokerage industry, competition has forced more and more brokerage firms to offer commission free exchange-traded funds (ETFs) to their customers since late 2009 when Charles Schwab became the first broker to let its customers trade ETFs without commission fees. [...]

Last week, in the discussion of EverBank MarketSafe Diversified Commodities CD, I mentioned that as food and oil prices keep going up, such products as the Commodities CD may be a way to invest commodities. Even though oil price has eased a little bit after breaking the $100/barrel level the first time since 2008, food [...]

Last year, I made some changes to a portion of my wife’s IRA account that’s held at Scottrade. What I did was I sold a couple of mutual funds I still owned in the account and bought one ETF instead. For the past few years, I have used Scottrade’s systematic purchase plan to buy shares of [...]

Exactly one year ago, Fidelity announced that it started to offer commission free ETFs to its customers. At that time, a total of 25 ETFs were provided to Fidelity brokerage account customers free of commission charges. Apparently, Fidelity’s move, together with Charles Schweb’s commission free offers of its own ETFs earlier, added fire to the [...]