The Sun's Financial Diary

As we entered the final weeks of 2006, mutual fund companies start to make year-end distributions. Yesterday, another fund in my mutual fund portfolio, Oakmark Equity and Income Fund (OAKBX), paid out annual dividend and capital gain. So far, two of my mutual funds distributed dividend and capital gain (CSVFX distributed on September 20th): Symbol [...]

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, [...]

An article in yesterday's USAToday prompted to check the fees I paid for those funds in my 401(k) plan. Unlike mutual funds holding in my taxable accounts, in which I have the flexibility to choose from perhaps hundreds of funds in the same category from as many companies, the number of funds in my 401(k) [...]

If you look to add some mid-cap funds into your portfolio. Here's the good news. According to Morningstar.com, Vanguard Strategic Equity Fund (VSEQX) (a Mid-blend fund with an EP of 0.82% and YTD return 10.31%, 3-year return 14.89% and 5-year return 14.50%), which was closed to new investers in April 2006 due to asset size [...]

Vanguard may be a great company for investing, but my experience with them on non-investing related issues wasn’t that great at all. It all began with my Roth IRA transfer that I started the same time last month. Here’s the timeline of the process (and it isn’t over yet): September 30: Mailed Roth IRA transfer [...]

Every day? Every week? or Every month? When I first started investing in 2001, I was so eager to see how my investments (mutual funds) were doing, I just couldn’t wait till 6 o’clock in the eventing to get the closing prices. So I entered the top 10 or 15 holdings of each mutual funds [...]

This is the last item on the September 2006 score card: asset allocations of the taxable accounts. In addition to investing regularly in our retirement accounts (401(k)s, Roth IRAs), I also have some stocks, ETFs, and mutual funds in taxable accounts. Right now, these accounts serve as supplements to our retirement investments. When it comes [...]

This is the title of an article from Kiplinger’s Personal Finance. The article suggested several options to start investing with a small amount of money (less than $500). According to the article, youngsters can start stock investment with Sharebuilder, which charges $4 for each transaction. For the long-term, the article brought up a couple of [...]