The Sun's Financial Diary

It seems that TradeKing (check out TradeKing reviews and interview with CEO Montarano for more on TradeKing) has made some changes on their ACH policy. I first saw the discussion on FatWallet forum early last week about TradeKing’s increased ACH period. At that time, the ACH deposit policy looks like this: ACH Deposits – 5 [...]

Early this week, I had an unpleasant experience with Zecco when I was charged $4.50 commission when buying a few shares of CSUN. What I was upset is the commission itself. I pay more than $4.50 commission with other brokers (Scottrade $7.0 and TradeKing $4.95). I was unhappy about how it happened: The order went [...]

Yesterday, I used my play money at Zecco to buy 66 shares of China Sunergy (CSUN). The purchase price was $3.29 and at the moment when I bought the stock, I had $221 cash in my account, enough to make the purchase which was valued at $217.14. The order went through, as it was supposed. [...]

With the stock market as volatile as it can be, I decided to take advantage of stocks’ slump recently to make a few quick bucks. I had a “play account” at Zecco to make speculative stock purchase (sadly, that account is close to nothing right now), but this time I am using Scottrade instead because [...]

Will you buy an investment that gives you zero return? Under normal circumstance, I assume nobody will take such an investment. After all, investing is about return, right? Seeking return is what people normally do. However, now is not normal. Safety is on everybody’s mind. And when safety becomes the first priority, investors turn to [...]

A month ago, I wrote a post on asset allocation where I discussed the importance of having a diversified portfolio that consists of various asset classes. The reason for doing that is quite simple: as we have long believed, diversification can mitigate risks. When I was building my virtual all-ETF portfolio a while ago, I [...]

Nowadays, you can buy lot of quality stocks such as GE (GE), Alcoa (AA), Microsoft (MSFT), or eBay (EBAY) at very low price after relentless selling on the Wall Street all year long, if you have the stomach for short term volatility. For these stocks, you will have to go back 10 or even 20 [...]

When I logged into my ING Direct account this morning, I noticed a new function that I didn’t remember a couple of weeks ago when I checked my account last time: The function to allow you to view your ShareBuilder brokerage account right from ING Direct. Actually, I think this function is kind of overdue [...]