The Sun's Financial Diary

Though it’s still almost two months away from the 2009 tax deadline, April 15, 2010, brokerage firms and mutual fund companies have already rolled out promotions to lure taxpayers to open IRA accounts with them. Among them, OptionsHouse is offering 100 commission free trades if you open an IRA account, such as Traditional, Roth, SEP, [...]

When I compared broker web-based trading platforms a while ago, I mentioned that most brokers I am using only have web-based trading platforms, except Scottrade, which also offers a standalone, PC-based platform called ScottradeELITE (available for customers with account balance of $25,000 or more). What I like about the separate program is that it’s much, [...]

Like about 100 million people across the country, I spent my Sunday evening watching Super Bowl XLIV between the Indianapolis Colts and the New Orleans Saints. I didn’t have a particular rooting interest in either of the teams although I did enjoy the feel good fairy tale ending for the city of New Orleans. It [...]

Warren Buffett is in the news again! Well, I suppose in the world of Wall Street, Warren Buffett never really leaves the news but the information that came out of Omaha, Nebraska this past week is particularly noteworthy. On January 26th, it was announced that Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett’s holding company, would be replacing Burlington Northern [...]

This is what competition is about. Early last month, Charles Schwab reduced the commission for online equity trading to $8.95 per trade from the original price of $12.95. The move, as an recent article on Barron’s noted, could trigger a new price war in online trading. Now, there’s a strong evidence that the war may [...]

I bought a lot of individual stocks in 2009 in my brokerage accounts, mostly with Scottrade. Many of them were purchased before the market hit the bottom (now we can safely call it the bottom) in March. But those stocks were not all what I bought last year. In addition to stocks purchased here and [...]

ChoiceTrade, headquartered in Central New Jersey, is another online discount broker which offers stock and options trading at a discounted price (ChoiceTrade is one of the discount brokers highlighted in my discount broker comparison post). The current trading commission at ChoiceTrade is $5 per online stock trade with no limit on the size of the [...]

This topic has been discussed many times in the past. In my last post in April 2009, I mentioned that despite the apparent lower costs, index funds remains unpopular among investors, accounting for only 12% of the total equity mutual fund assets as of 2007. There are many reasons that investors turn their back on [...]