The Sun's Financial Diary

If you are using Vanguard mutual funds or ETFs to build your investment portfolio, may it be a retirement account or regular brokerage account, you are going to like this piece of news. Vanguard announced on December 28th that starting December of 2012, the company changed expense ratios (ERs) of a number of funds (so [...]

Early this year, two popular online discount stock brokers, Zecco and TradeKing, announced that they are merging their businesses together. For a while, I still had to log in separately to my Zecco and TradeKing accounts to perform any transaction or management of the accounts. Early on I asked TradeKing the possibility of combining the [...]

I have been a Scottrade customer for more than 10 years. As a long time user, I am glad to see that Scottrade keeps introducing new or improved products to its customers. This time, it’s the Scottrader Streaming Quotes tool, with more enhanced features. As I mentioned in my broker web-based trading platform comparison post [...]

Update: Last week I wrote about how you can buy ETFs without paying any commission and in the article, I listed Scottrade as one of the brokers which currently offers commission-free ETFs to its customers. The information I had in the article about Scottrade ETFs was from the March 2011 Scottrade announcement when those commission-free ETFs [...]

“Can I buy and sell ETFs without paying any commission fee?” Yes, you can. Actually, you don’t need to have a lot of money to trade exchange-traded funds (ETFs) for free these days and your choices of where to get commission-free ETFs are plenty. As Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) continue to gain popularity among cost-conscious [...]

Back in 2007 when the China’s stock market was red hot (Shanghai Composite Index peaked in October 2008 and since then lost nearly two-third of its value), I got myself an E*Trade Global Trading Account and bought two stocks that were traded in Hong Kong using the account. Though there are plenty of Chinese ADRs [...]

Which tool are you using to track your investment portfolio, in real-time and free? Actually, there are quite a few web tools that let you create and track your investments for free. For example, you can create a portfolio tracker using Yahoo or Google Finance and from there, you can either manually enter transactions yourself or [...]

These days, I find myself using Scottrade Mobile App for Android phones a lot to trade stocks. The main reason is, of course, convenience because sometimes when I am at work, using company computer to trade stocks during work hours isn’t an option.  Not that I trade a lot, but by using the mobile app [...]