The Sun's Financial Diary

Everybody is looking for a way to squeeze a little more return out of their investments. Some will take the next step up the risk ladder while others will look at tax-advantaged accounts as a means of keeping a little more in their pockets. Both of these are certainly reasonable methods of improving your investment [...]

Believe it or not, there are other trading options beside just the traditional stocks and bonds. One of the popular ones that is often somewhat of a mystery for average investors is something known as stock options (I started to learn options trading not long ago). What Are Stock Options Stock options are traded in [...]

It commenced as a decade of promise. America said goodbye to the 90′s with rousement and promise for a new century that gave hope to continued prosperity, advances in technology, and a intensity of our country’s global investments and succeeding role as the economic and military authority of the free world. Ten years later, America [...]

Well, maybe not exactly tricky, but the whole process isn’t as straightforward as one would expect at least. I have an IRA account with Vanguard for years. The investments I have in that account until now are all Vanguard mutual funds and since I only buy Vanguard funds, it is pretty easy to buy, sell, [...]

With the stock market continuing to struggle to make any meaningful gains over the last decade, the typical investor’s appetite for risk has shrunk. Back during the technology bubble days of 10 years ago, riskier high return investments were all the rage. Nowadays, people don’t want to touch them with a ten foot pole. Still, [...]

When I did the discount broker comparison post last year, I singled out a few brokers, that don’t belong to the group mainly because of the commissions they charge for trading stocks, even though some are quite popular. One of brokers that was not included is optionsXpress, which had a commission as high as $14.95 [...]

We all know that Bank of America has a broker unit which also offers commission-free equity trades. However, to qualify for the 30 free trades per month, you will have to have at least $25,000 combined assets in deposit accounts with BofA. Though the dollar amount required for free trades is the same as Zecco [...]

Wikinvest generated a lot of buzz a couple of weeks ago when it announced a platform that lets users track their investments at brokers in real-time. If you are not familiar with Wikinvest, it works kind of like Mint.com, which tracks transactions in my bank accounts,  but what Wikinvest tracks are investments at brokerage accounts. [...]