The Sun's Financial Diary

In about a month or so, your mailbox will start to get filled with year-end bank account and investment statements. And for the first time in a while, you won’t have to cringe when you look because as a whole the market has done pretty well this year. The S&P 500 is up over 20% [...]

This is the third segment of the broker trading platform review series. So far I have covered Scottrade and Firstrade. Today, I am going to take a look at another online broker, optionsXpress. I mentioned early that, though I have an account with optionsXpress for nearly 2 years, I didn’t make any trades with optionsXpress [...]

Looks like online brokers are running a lot of promotions these days to attract new customers. SogoTrade is offering 100 commission free trades for every new customer. It’s quite easy to get the free trades: Open a SogoTrade account; fund the account with $500; receive the bonus. There is a restriction on the free trades [...]

I forget when was the last time I traded stocks. It must have been at least a few months ago because since I started this new job in June, I barely had any time during the day for *my own business* , but today I made a couple of purchases: one IPO stock and one [...]

When E*Trade launched its global trading platform in 2007, I saw it as an opportunity to finally be able to buy some internationals stocks that are not otherwise available to retail investors in the U.S. At that time, Chinese stocks were as hot as they could be and buying Chinese stocks seemed to be the [...]

As you may know, discount broker OptionsHouse is currently running a promotion which gives 100 commission free trades for every new customer with $3,000 deposit.  This is a good deal if you can get the most out of the offer, even though trading 100 times in 2 months (the free trades will expire 60 days [...]

One of the biggest advantages of Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs) over traditional mutual funds is that ETFs usually cost much less to own because of the way ETFs are structured. Also helping to reduce the cost is that not before long, all ETFs are passively managed, meaning that they all track their respective index, minimizing the [...]

The last time I wrote about I-Bond interest rate was last May when the Treasury Department set the total earning rate of Series I-Bond issued from May to November to 0.00% due to the negative annual inflation rate, which has already affected the contribution of 2010 401(k) plan. Even though that I-Bonds purchased in the past [...]