The Sun's Financial Diary

In today’s environment, “fee transparency” is the mantra for all kinds of financial products. Unfortunately, it’s been slow in coming to variable annuities. Some real progress has been made with simple, transparent, low-cost products. But until greater consumer value is widespread, here’s a primer on how to peel away the layers of an annuity’s fees [...]

Are you still interested in ShareBuilder? If you are, then you can get $25 bonus when opening a new account. This offer is only good for joint, individual and custodial accounts, not for IRA or ESA accounts. The bonus will be credited to your new account within four to six weeks after the first transaction [...]

I wasted little time in building up my Lending Club portfolio. Only a few days in the peer-to-peer lending business, I already have, believe it or not, 20 loans (notes) in my portfolio 8 of them are $25 loans and the rest are $50 loans at a total value of $794.68. Right now, I don’t [...]

Are you using stop in your trading to make money, and more importantly, to preserve your capital if the trade doesn’t go your way? In this educational video from INO, you will know what the three widely used stops, dollar stop, percentage stop, and chart stop, are how they work. The video will also teach [...]

As I mentioned early, gold has made a tremendous run lately. The main force behind the gold rally is the deterioration of economies around world. Despite the passage of the $789 billion economic stimulus package over the weekend, gold price keeps climbing up after the holiday. Currently spot gold is traded at $967 an ounce, [...]

Last month, I wrote an article on S&P 500 high dividend paying stocks.  Over the weekend, Barron’s released a video with more explanations on the S&P dividend aristocrats.

In the exchange-traded fund (ETF) world, things have happened fast and furious. According to an article on Financial Planning, a total of 434 ETFs were launched in 2006 and 2007. In 2008, a very bad year for stock and mutual fund investors in general, another 164 new ETFs were introduced, as financial firms try to [...]

When I discussed how to build a Lazy Portfolio with ETF last December, I mentioned that the reason why one of the Lazy Portfolios outperformed (still negative though) the S&P 500 index last year was its relatively large position is bonds, which did quite well  in 2008 comparing to equities. Now you just got more [...]