The Sun's Financial Diary

The first quarter of 2009 is in the books. Thanks to the strong rally in the second half of March, the U.S. stock market ended the month on the positive note, even though it wasn’t enough the pull the market out of the red for the quarter. For the quarter, the S&P 500 Index lost [...]

The economic crisis around world has put China under the spotlight. The world’s third largest economy, who also holds nearly $2 trillion in foreign exchange reserve, has started to use its nearly $600 stimulus package to revive its economy, building highways and railroads, investing in educations, and improving social welfare. While banks in the U.S. [...]

As I mentioned early, gold has made a tremendous run lately. The main force behind the gold rally is the deterioration of economies around world. Despite the passage of the $789 billion economic stimulus package over the weekend, gold price keeps climbing up after the holiday. Currently spot gold is traded at $967 an ounce, [...]

In the exchange-traded fund (ETF) world, things have happened fast and furious. According to an article on Financial Planning, a total of 434 ETFs were launched in 2006 and 2007. In 2008, a very bad year for stock and mutual fund investors in general, another 164 new ETFs were introduced, as financial firms try to [...]

When I discussed how to build a Lazy Portfolio with ETF last December, I mentioned that the reason why one of the Lazy Portfolios outperformed (still negative though) the S&P 500 index last year was its relatively large position is bonds, which did quite well  in 2008 comparing to equities. Now you just got more [...]

Last week, I talked about CGM Focus Fund (CGMFX) and how the fund was hammered after oil prices plunged. Currently traded around $37 a barrel, crude oil prices have lost more than $100 since last July. Even though the OPEC has pledged deep cut in oil production, demands for oil were hampered as global economies [...]

Are you familiar with the idea of Lazy Portfolios? I first read about Lazy Portfolios a few years on MarketWatch and since then have been following them. The idea of Lazy Portfolios is to use low-cost, index mutual funds to build well-diversified portfolios so that you can be “lazy” with your investments, without having to [...]

So the election is finally over. When President-elect Obama takes the office in January, we can expect changes in policies on many fronts (if he means what he meant “Change”) and one of them could be the current administration’s energy policy, which has been criticized by many for favoring big oil companies. According to a [...]