The Sun's Financial Diary

A big sell-off as the one we witnessed yesterday always presents a buying opportunity, though for long-term investment, one-day drop won’t mean too much. That being said, when you are ready to invest, why buy high and you can buy low? This morning when I logged in my Firstrade account, I noticed that the fund [...]

I have long been considering some consolidations of my regular mutual fund investments. What prompted me for making the change was that some funds in my collection (I currently have twelve of them) have seen some dramatic style shifts in recent years and, therefore, no longer meet the overall investment objective. After a recent portfolio [...]

This is the second part of the Model Portfolio Built with ETFs series, which convert Jonathan’s Model Portfolios into all-ETF portfolios. In this part (the first part can be found here), I looked at the four example portfolios in The Bogleheads’ Guide to Investing and examined ways to reconstruct these portfolios using nothing but exchange [...]

Last month, Jonathan at MyMoneyBlog ran a series on model portfolios which covered some (so far six) popular portfolios based on various investment philosophies. When these model portfolios were originally developed (some are more than thirty years old), the main investment vehicles were mutual funds, where were apparently the only choices at that time. However, [...]

Richard Widows of The Street.com last week published a list of 10 most diversified ETFs. The criteria used in the screening include the fund has to have at 2% exposure in 12 major industry categories: basic materials, capital goods, communications services, consumer cyclicals, consumer staples, energy, finance, health care, technology, transportation, utilities and miscellaneous. The [...]

PowerShares Capital, together with Deutsche Bank, launched seven new sector ETFs early this month. Among the new offerings, one is PowerShares DB Gold Fund (DGL). According to the fund prospectus, DGL is based on the Deutsche Bank LiquidCommodity Index – Optimum Yield Gold, which has the following performance as of December 31, 2006:

I opend a QQQDirect account about two weeks ago and set up an automatic investment plan (the plan that offers one free QQQQ purchase every month) with $50 monthly purchase of QQQQ. When I checked my account last Friday, there was still no record of any investment yet, though the date I chose is the [...]

John Bogel, founder of Vanguard and pioneer of index mutual funds, is aiming his firepower at ETFs this time, especially the index and sector ETFs. Of the total asset in all index mutual funds is about $900 billion, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) now take a 38% share. In an article appeared on Bloomberg.com yesterday, Mr. Bogel, [...]