The Sun's Financial Diary

Early last week, I took a look at Scottrade trading platform because it’s the broker that I use the most for stock trading (not that I trade a lot). As you know, Scottrade isn’t my only stock broker. In fact, it is one of many brokerage accounts I own. Another *old* account I have is [...]

OptionsHouse is one of the discount brokers that I have an account with. I opened the account in June when I found that it charges only $2.95 per stock trade, much less than other brokers I use (Zecco offers free trade, but the requirement is rather high for small investors). However, it disappointed me when [...]

The stock is down pretty badly so far today. For some investors,  this is an opportunity to buy stocks at a better price, given that the market was down four out of the six trading sessions. Suppose that you see a stock that you have wanted to buy and today it finally reaches the price [...]

Prosper, one of the earliest players in peer-to-peer lending, was quite last year and early this year because it failed to meet regulatory requirements. It wasn’t allowed to keep operating until it was cleared by the SEC. Its chief rival Lending Club, on the other hand, was quick to get the OK from the regulator [...]

In my post over the weekend, I took a quick look at Lending Club’s new statistics page. The improved web page offers potential lenders a range of tools to evaluate the overall performance and risk of lending money through Lending Club. In addition to statistics provided by LC, you can also download raw data from [...]

Sottrade is a online discount stock broker which offers investors, big and small, a wide range of products and trading tools at a competitive price. One of the online discount stock brokers I use very actively is Scottrade. When I first selected Scottrade as my broker 7 years ago, I didn’t know not much about [...]

One of the biggest challenges when investing through social lending platforms such as Lending Club is evaluating loans to minimize, but not totally avoid, risks involved in lending money to total strangers. It’s not an easy task because, though Lending Club does its job to collect and verify the data,  there’s just some much information [...]

I have been using Lending Club as an alternative investment vehicle for more than half a year now. At beginning, I could only invest in LC loans through their note trading platform because of the residency restrictions. Then since last month, I began to invest directly with Lending Club after moving from NJ to VA. [...]