The Sun's Financial Diary

The Oakmark Funds reopened its Global Fund (OAKGX) on May 9, 2008. The fund, which has been closed to new investors since December 2003, invests in both domestic and foreign markets, holding 42.6% of its assets in U.S. stocks and and the rest in developed and emerging economies outside the country. According to Morningstar.com, OAKGX [...]

Micro-cap fund specialist Washtch Advisors today announced that it will temporarily reopen two micro-cap funds, Wasatch International Opportunities Fund (WAIOX) Wasatch Micro Cap Value Fund (WAMVX), to all investors. Unlike other funds that were recently reopened, these two funds seem never available to individual investors because they were both closed on the day when they [...]

Since I began to actively use my Zecco account to trade stocks in March, I got myself a task that I don’t want: find a place to store the mail Zecco sent me every time I made a trade. It’s not really a piece of junk mail that I can just throw away, but close [...]

A little over one year ago, I bought a Buffalo gold coin from Bullion Direct (my review of Bullion Direct) when the price was around $640 an ounce. Somehow, I never considered that as an investment, though gold has gained a lot in the past year. Currently at $885, gold actually made a good investment [...]

Today, April 22nd, is Earth Day and one of the topic being discussed is how to live a green life and save our environment. On this year’s Earth Day, the government also announced a plan to boost fuel efficiency by 25%, increasing per gallon mileage from 27.5 to 35.7, on the same day when the [...]

In his book, A Random Walk Down Wall Street, author Burton Malkiel declared that A blindfolded monkey throwing darts at a newspaper’s financial pages could select a portfolio that would do just as well as one carefully selected by the experts. Do you believe random walk? Or do you follow your own research? Or maybe [...]

Less than a month after Bear Stearns became the first firm ever to offer actively managed exchange-traded fund (ETF), PowerShares, an major player in the ETF arena, introduced its own active ETFs last Friday. The four new ETFs, including both equity and fixed income funds, are: PowerShares Active AlphaQ Fund (PQY) PowerShares Active Alpha Multi-Cap [...]

Do you invest in Treasury bills, notes, and bonds? If you do, then there’s a good news. Starting early this week, Treasury Department has lowered the minimum purchase from $1,000 to $100. The change applies to Treasury bills, notes, and bonds with maturity from 4 weeks to 30 years, which means that 4-week T-bill is [...]