The Sun's Financial Diary

Check out these hot mutual funds ranked by net cash inflows by Morningstar. But a hot fund may not be a good fund for your portfolio. Last week, Morningstar, the fund research firm, published a list of 10 mutual funds with highest net inflows in the first half of 2008. Given how much the stocks [...]

TradeKing, a online discount broker, is running a Refer a Friend on National Friendship Day promotion which will give you $50 for a new account. I will make the promotion even sweeter. Are you using TradeKing? If not, are you considering getting an account? if so, then here’s your chance to profit from it, getting [...]

Early last month, I ran a poll here at this blog asking readers to name their favorite brokers. The purpose of that poll is to see what we ordinary investors are using when it comes to buy and sell stocks/ETFs and whether our choice coincide with experts’ opinion. When I search for a broker, my [...]

Do you remember when was the last time the Dow had two consecutive 200+ days? I don’t, but that doesn’t matter because I am concerned about the stock markets now than historical performance. After closing below 11,000 for the Dow for the first time in two year this Tuesday, the stock markets put together a [...]

So what are alternative energies? According to Wikipedia, alternative energy sources include biomass, geothermal, solar energy, wind energy, and wave power. In late April, Glaymore Securities launched a Solar Energy exchange-traded fund, TAN, which lets investors in solar energy providers as well as solar energy related equipment and material suppliers. Early this month, PowerShares introduced [...]

On my way to work this morning, there was news that Fannie Mae (FNM) and Freddie Mac (FRE), two congressionally chartered mortgage agencies, were on the verge of being bailed out by the government. That was not a piece of good news, given how hard the stock markets have been hit by subprime mortgage related [...]

Yesterday, we saw the Dow made a 276-point turnaround to close the trading session with a gain of 38 points. What fueled the rally was the surprising June sales number from GM. And the turnaround actually made people speculate that the second half of 2008 may give investors a better time than the first half [...]

The last time I inserted the Dow’s intra-day chart, the benchmark dropped some 400 points. That’s was less than three weeks. Today is another bloody day for stocks, under similar circumstance as 20 days ago: Oil surged past $140 a barrel; More writedowns are expected at financial firms Citigroup and Merrill Lynch; Car makers are [...]