The Sun's Financial Diary

General Motors (GM), the world’s largest car maker for 77 years until 2008, filed for Chapter 11 protection this morning, the same day its fellow car maker Chrysler could exit bankruptcy. The bankruptcy filing is expected after GM failed to reconstruct its debts with bondholders before the June 1 deadline imposed by the government. In [...]

Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway filed its first quarter 13-F with the SEC last week. From the filing, you may find a few investment ideas from where Buffet is putting his money, as noted by Morningstar. At the end of the first quarter, Berkshire holds a total of 41 stocks in its equity portfolio, with American [...]

Despite all the troubles at the financial service company, E*Trade Financial scored a big win in the latest SmartMoney Broker Survey, leading four out of five categories. Though I don’t use E*Trade as my stock broker, nor do I have a savings account with them, I do have a E*Trade Global Trading Account to trade [...]

Many industrial groups got hurt pretty badly in this one and a half year long recession. Banks, homebuilders, retailers, just to name a few. However, the recession has also proven to be an opportunity for others to bloom in this environment because when the wallet got tight, we cut our spending: we postpone purchase of [...]

It has been nearly three months since I last updated my Lending Club loan portfolio, even though I wasn’t quiet during this period of time. In fact, I have already more than doubled the number of loans I own since I got into the peer-to-peer lending business in February. Right now, I have 54 notes [...]

Well, that’s not exactly what I said, but I found that a piece by Knight Kiplinger, the Editor in Chief of Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, in the June issue of the  magazine says a lot about what an investor should do in this stormy economic environment. Mr. Kiplinger isn’t as well known as legendary investors such [...]

I am still expanding my stock investments, this time through the DSPP program at ComputerShare. Yesterday, I added ExxonMobil (XOM) to my regular purchase list with a monthly purchase of $100 of the stock. The reason that I want to buy it through a DSPP program rather making a one-time purchase like I did with [...]

On one hand, the exchange-traded fund (ETF) industry continues to expand at a record pace (the total number of ETFs at the end of 2008 grew to 747, up 118 from 2007); on the other hand, funds that get no love from investors are being eliminated. Last Friday, PowerShares, one of the major players in [...]