The Sun's Financial Diary

The year-long market turmoil has taken its toll on mutual funds, good and bad alike. Mutual fund companies saw their funds’ assets shrinking fast, not just because of the decline of the values of the fund’s holdings, but also the result of investors fleeing the fund when the performance suffers even if the fund is [...]

For some time, Dodge & Cox funds, especially the Stock Fund (DODGX) and International Stock Fund (DODFX), were my favorites. DODGX was one of the first funds I bought when I started to investing in mutual funds 6 years ago (I am still buying it every month) and DODFX was once the performance leader among [...]

On September 25th, Washington Mutual (WM), the Seattle based loan and savings giant, was seized by the FDIC after depositors withdrew more than $16 billion from the bank in 10 days over concerns that the bank, unable to find a buyer quickly (the talks and rumors on potential buyers have been going on for a [...]

Yesterday, I talked about why money-market funds may not be as safe as you think, after The Reserve Primary Fund cut the NAV of the fund from $1 to 97 cents. Even though money in mutual funds (money-market funds are mutual funds) are not insured or guaranteed by the government, the nature of the investments [...]

Yesterday, another piece of big news was that The Reserve Primary Fund (RFIXX) announced it cut the money-market fund’s net asset value (NAV) to 97 cents from $1.00, a news that surprised and shocked many, especially those invest in the fund . The reason the fund decided to reduce the NAV by 3 cents, also [...]

About a year ago, I looked at the performance of small-cap funds and compared it with S&P 500. The topic interested me because I am a fan of small-cap funds and have been buying them since I started investing in mutual funds. The last time when I checked the asset allocation of my portfolio, small-cap [...]

It was not long ago when everybody was talking about $200/barrel oil and $5/gallon gas and how the energy price could affect the economy, which is battling a possible recession, and consumers, who have already been strained by high cost of living these days. From food to health care to tuition, prices just kept going [...]

Check out these hot mutual funds ranked by net cash inflows by Morningstar. But a hot fund may not be a good fund for your portfolio. Last week, Morningstar, the fund research firm, published a list of 10 mutual funds with highest net inflows in the first half of 2008. Given how much the stocks [...]