The Sun's Financial Diary

Last November, shortly after the Dow peaked at 14,280 points, I had a post on dividend yields of the largest banks in the country. At that time, I thought that, with many bank stocks yielding 6.0% or more, buying banks make some sense if the banks can keep their dividend payouts. That was then and [...]

International ETFs, especially emerging market ETFs, have been generous to investors in the past couple of years (remember the good “old” days of high-flying Chinese stocks?). However, things turned a little bit sour since the financial crisis triggered by subprime mortgage in the summer of 2007. On surface, the trouble here in this country seems [...]

ShareBuilder continues to make changes after being acquired by ING. ShareBuilder today announced that it now allows investors to buy mutual funds through it’s automatic investment plans. ShareBuilder is one of the popular discount brokers which offers investors to buy stocks at dollar amount rather than share amount at $4.00 commission. The new service makes [...]

I have been using automatic purchases plans to buy most of my mutual funds for years. The date that I chose for making the monthly purchase is the 5th of the month. The reasons for selecting this date are: I don’t want to buy funds at the end of the month because that’s the time [...]

I often heard of stock splits, but this is the first time I learned splits of shares of exchanged-traded funds (anybody else has done that already?). Of course, since ETFs are traded just like stocks, the split shouldn’t be a surprise at all. Mutual fund giant Vanguard, which is also becoming a major player in [...]

Investing in global real estate just got a little easier. Early last month, State Street Global Advisors launched yet another global real estate ETF. The SPDR DJ Wilshire Global Real Estate ETF (RWO) is the third REIT exchange-traded fund introduced by SSgA (the other two are DJ Wilshire REIT ETF (RWR) and DJ Wilshire REIT [...]

Not that it’s significant, but in case you haven’t noticed, Google Finance starts to offer real-time stock quotes for securities listed on the NASDAQ. What it means is that from now on, when you type in a ticker symbol in your Google toolbar, the quote you see will be real time, no more 20 minutes [...]

I started my own Zecco referral bonus sharing program back in December 2007 when Zecco relaunched its Zecco Friend program. At the beginning, it was actually pretty good. I sent new customers to Zecco and got a $50 bonus for each new customer shortly after they opened and funded a new account. I then shared [...]