The Sun's Financial Diary

Yesterday, I posted an all-ETF portfolio that I’d like to have if I have to start all over again to build my investments. What I want to achieve with that portfolio are: Diversification: I want to have key asset classes included in the portfolio so it will provide balanced risk-reward with relatively high growth potential; [...]

I like ETFs. I bought my first ETF, PowerShares Golden Dragon USX China (PGJ), in December 2004 and since then, I have gradually added a few more exchange-traded funds to my investment portfolio, such as PGJ, PHO, and VBR. In the past, I have thought about creating an all-ETF portfolio and attempted to build model [...]

So what are alternative energies? According to Wikipedia, alternative energy sources include biomass, geothermal, solar energy, wind energy, and wave power. In late April, Glaymore Securities launched a Solar Energy exchange-traded fund, TAN, which lets investors in solar energy providers as well as solar energy related equipment and material suppliers. Early this month, PowerShares introduced [...]

International ETFs, especially emerging market ETFs, have been generous to investors in the past couple of years (remember the good “old” days of high-flying Chinese stocks?). However, things turned a little bit sour since the financial crisis triggered by subprime mortgage in the summer of 2007. On surface, the trouble here in this country seems [...]

I often heard of stock splits, but this is the first time I learned splits of shares of exchanged-traded funds (anybody else has done that already?). Of course, since ETFs are traded just like stocks, the split shouldn’t be a surprise at all. Mutual fund giant Vanguard, which is also becoming a major player in [...]

Investing in global real estate just got a little easier. Early last month, State Street Global Advisors launched yet another global real estate ETF. The SPDR DJ Wilshire Global Real Estate ETF (RWO) is the third REIT exchange-traded fund introduced by SSgA (the other two are DJ Wilshire REIT ETF (RWR) and DJ Wilshire REIT [...]

Today, April 22nd, is Earth Day and one of the topic being discussed is how to live a green life and save our environment. On this year’s Earth Day, the government also announced a plan to boost fuel efficiency by 25%, increasing per gallon mileage from 27.5 to 35.7, on the same day when the [...]

Less than a month after Bear Stearns became the first firm ever to offer actively managed exchange-traded fund (ETF), PowerShares, an major player in the ETF arena, introduced its own active ETFs last Friday. The four new ETFs, including both equity and fixed income funds, are: PowerShares Active AlphaQ Fund (PQY) PowerShares Active Alpha Multi-Cap [...]