The Sun's Financial Diary

It didn’t take long for the 16 shares of Freddie Mac (FRE) that I still own with Scottrade to reach the worthless price. I could have sold my position when the stock was at something around $1.50 the first thing in the morning, but that wouldn’t save me anything since I bought those shares at [...]

It was not long ago when everybody was talking about $200/barrel oil and $5/gallon gas and how the energy price could affect the economy, which is battling a possible recession, and consumers, who have already been strained by high cost of living these days. From food to health care to tuition, prices just kept going [...]

Update: This promotion has expired. Just a quick reminder. There are a few more days left to take advantage of this $50+$20 bonus offer. Tonight, I was about to send out the first batch of bonuses I received from TradeKing to those who used my referrals to get a TradeKing account, then I realized that [...]

Did you buy any gold coin recently? I didn’t, but it looks like there’s some kind of shortage of gold coins. Gold has gone through a volatile period lately as the U.S. dollar rebounded strongly against the Euro and commodities, including oil and precious metals, posted sharp decline. Traders abandoned gold as a hedge against [...]

A little more than one month ago, I bought 16 shares of Freddie Mac [[FRE]] when the share dropped nearly 50% at the opening. At that time, my thought was “How bad things could be” at these government chartered mortgage providers (Freddie and Fannie). Aren’t they too big to fail? FRE did have a good [...]

Yesterday, I posted an all-ETF portfolio that I’d like to have if I have to start all over again to build my investments. What I want to achieve with that portfolio are: Diversification: I want to have key asset classes included in the portfolio so it will provide balanced risk-reward with relatively high growth potential; [...]

I like ETFs. I bought my first ETF, PowerShares Golden Dragon USX China (PGJ), in December 2004 and since then, I have gradually added a few more exchange-traded funds to my investment portfolio, such as PGJ, PHO, and VBR. In the past, I have thought about creating an all-ETF portfolio and attempted to build model [...]

I haven’t used my Firstrade account for a while. Actually, the account is largely abandoned since I moved all my investments at Firstrade to TradeKing last December. Tonight, when I didn’t log into my account to send a referral to a reader, I noticed that Firstrade is now also offering a $50 cash bonus in [...]