The Sun's Financial Diary

As an investor of exchange traded funds (ETFs), I am always on the lookout for new ETF research tools to make researching and investing a little easier. In the past, I have discussed a few tools that I found, such as the ETF rating tool from XTF. And usually when I research an ETF, I [...]

As an investor, I felt a little relieved when October is finally over, especially when all three major indices closed the month with two consecutive gains, which is a rare event these days. What is not rare the past month are the huge ups and downs of the indices, especially the Dow Jones Industrial Average.  [...]

Today, the Bureau of the Public Debt announced the interest rates for Series I-bond issued between November 2008 and April 2009. The total rate is set at 5.64%, including a fixed rate of 0.70% and an annualized rate of 4.92% adjusted based on the Consumer Price Index for all Urban Consumers (CPI-U). The total rate [...]

When TradeKing announced its special $50 new account bouns promotion early this month, the offer was set to expire tomorrow. Now, it looks like the discount broker has decided to extend the promotion one more month into November, a sign I see that the promotion is going pretty well. Actually, this is one of the [...]

The stock markets are pretty volatile these days with huge up-and-down swings happening almost on a daily basis (the past month has produced 5 of the 10 largest drops of the Dow). At the same time, gold, which I follow quite closely, also had some roller coaster rides lately, but the general trend of gold [...]

In early September, I put up a post on the new Scottrade 3 commission free trades promotion. Because I have been a loyal Scottrade customer for many years and generally quite happy with their service, I wanted to share the promotion with everybody so people can save some money on commissions if they want to [...]

Looking for basic knowledge on investing and trading? Online discount broker TradeKing (check out my TradeKing interview and review to learn more about the broker) is to offer a series of free webinars to help investors at all levels get a better understanding of trading and investing. The first webinar will be held tomorrow, October [...]

TradeKing is my latest broker that I got last December when I switched from Firstrade to TradeKing. The main reason for me to decide to open another brokerage account was that TradeKing charges less commission per trade. Since then, I have been using TradeKing quite regularly and found that the discount broker, while cheap on [...]