The Sun's Financial Diary

There was a short Q&A in The Wall Street Journal yesterday where the question being asked is the following: I would like to buy only a few stocks in certain companies. Are there any online brokers that handle people with only a couple hundred dollars in their account and don’t charge heavy fees for infrequent [...]

Investors will soon be able to invest in Oakmark’s two international funds again. I received an email from Oakmark Fund yesterday which announces that two previously closed international funds, International Fund I (OAKIX) and International Small Cap Fund (OAKEX) will re-open to new investors on January 2, 2008. Both funds are managed by David Herro, [...]

In the third part of the 2007 Consumer Reports Ultimate Money Guide, a method was provided by the magazine on how to beat the broad market index, which is repeated in the following: No-load: Look at no-load funds only. Low-fee: Identify those with lowest expense ratios. High-asset: Keep those with the most assets under management. [...]

Early this month, there’s an article on Morningstar.com discussing the allocation of stocks and bonds in an investment portfolio. Determining the right mix of stocks and bonds depends on many factors, such as age, risk tolerance, and return expectation. For aggressive investors with longer time horizon, they can afford to put a large port of [...]

I have a previous post that compared my actively managed funds against Vanguard funds for a 5-year period that covered most of the time I invested in those funds. The purpose of the post was to have an idea whether actively managed funds, while costing a little more to own, indeed lagged low-cost index funds [...]

I am a big fan of small-cap funds. At one time, I had several small-cap funds, both value and growth, in my taxable investment accounts. Though I have trimmed the number to two, they are still a significant portion of my portfolio as small-cap is nearly a quarter of my taxable mutual fund investments. The [...]

For quite some time, Dodge & Cox International Fund (DODFX) was the top performer in our mutual fund investments. Less than two months ago, our investments in the fund have returned more than 100%. However, the market downturn since then has eroded some of the gains. Now the overall return of this fund is down [...]

There are sellers, there are buyers, and there are investors doing nothing. In this stormy market, who are you? I think I belong to the third group with a little bit buy activities. Rather than seeing the current market as the prelude of a recession as some have predicted, I treat the month-long decline as [...]