The Sun's Financial Diary

Are you concerned about investment costs, such as commissions, mutual fund fees, and any additional administrative fees? The costs to invest are always the No. 1 concern to me. That’s why I always look for stock brokers with the lowest commissions to trade stocks and mutual funds with less 1% fees to invest for the [...]

I opened a brokerage account with optionsXpress, now part of Charles Schwab, a few years ago when they ran a promotion that gave $100 bonus for a new account. Since then I have been running an optionsXpress referral program for people who want to receive some incentives to open an account with the broker (you [...]

A few years ago, I wrote a post about building my own portfolio with nothing but ETFs, when Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs) have started to gain popularity among investors. The idea was that, because of ETF’s popularity, it was entirely possible to pick one ETF in each asset class I wanted to invest in and assemble [...]

TD Ameritrade is one of the leading discount brokerage firms that offers investors a wide range of products and services to meet their investment needs. The company is not stranger to me and I have written about it here a few times in the past. However, despite its well-known name, I have never really used [...]

When I opened my TradeKing account in 2007,  I also got a book, The Options Playbook, from TradeKing after I expressed interest in options trading. I have bought and sold stocks for several years, but never traded options because I feel that trading options requires a little more skills than buying and selling stocks. Before [...]

As I mentioned earlier in the  asset allocation article, for whatever investment, there’s always a relationship between risk and reward. If I want to have a bigger reward, I will almost certainly have to take a higher risk. When building a investment portfolio, it’s always the case of finding the balance between the two, by taking [...]

I am not a customer of USAA, but I have heard some good things about some of its services, such as its No Fee Checking Account (given how much other big banks are charging these days for their checking accounts, truly free checking is pretty hard to find) and Auto Insurance services quite a few times in [...]

Suppose that you just started investing and wanted to build an investment portfolio that would increase the long-term benefits while reducing the risk, what’s the first thing that come up in your mind? Is it what particular stocks/mutual funds/ETFs you want to buy so that you can have the maximum return you could have with [...]