The Sun's Financial Diary

This isn’t what I asked for when I started to buy Bank of America (BAC) shares through their DRIP program at ComputerShare (ComputerShare reviews). I was going after their dividend. At $1.29 dividend payment in 2008, BAC made a small, but nice contribution to my passive income last year. But it doesn’t look like that [...]

When I first learned that Nortel Networks (NT) has sought bankruptcy protection this morning via @MarketWatch on Twitter (you can follow me on Twitter), I wasn’t really surprised (OK, a little bit). Wasn’t it just a month ago when reports came out that the company was seeking legal advices for a possible filing? Though NT [...]

Are you investing in quality, dividend paying stocks, either by buying individual stocks or investing in dividend oriented mutual funds or ETFs (exchange traded funds)? Why Invest in Dividend Stocks? If you are not, then I ask you to take a look at this chart from the S&P. It’s the cumulative return of $1 invested [...]

Last week, I talked about CGM Focus Fund (CGMFX) and how the fund was hammered after oil prices plunged. Currently traded around $37 a barrel, crude oil prices have lost more than $100 since last July. Even though the OPEC has pledged deep cut in oil production, demands for oil were hampered as global economies [...]

If you are a stock/mutual fund investor, you probably already felt the pain of putting your money in the stock markets in 2008. I did when I saw the 22% year-over-year decline in our net worth, even with all the new contributions we made throughout the year. As I mentioned in the past, all our [...]

A couple of days ago when I reviewed our 2008 passive income, I mentioned that CGM Focus Fund (CGMFX), which used to generate a large amount of annual capital gain/dividend in the past, only brought in this year a fraction the dividend it brought in a year ago. And that’s not the only part that [...]

So what happened to the Wall Street? Where will it go from here? Today, The Wall Street Journal released a 3-part video documentary series, End of Wall Street, with in-depth coverage of the financial crisis started in the summer of 2007. Following is the first part of the video, What Happened.

Are you familiar with the idea of Lazy Portfolios? I first read about Lazy Portfolios a few years on MarketWatch and since then have been following them. The idea of Lazy Portfolios is to use low-cost, index mutual funds to build well-diversified portfolios so that you can be “lazy” with your investments, without having to [...]