The Sun's Financial Diary

Jonathan Clements, who writes the Getting Going column on The Wall Street Journal, recently celebrated his 1000th column. In his milestone piece, Mr. Clements reflected his journey of the past 1o years for writing the Getting Going and summarized what he has observed from the developments in the financial industry in the past decade. According [...]

Gold isn’t the only hot precious metal in town these days. Spot silver surpassed the psychological $20 an ounce today to its highest level since October 17, 1980. Currently, silver is traded at $20.80/ounce (Kitco.com). So far this year, silver has gained more than 39%. Then, there’s platinum which is also on fire since the [...]

In case you didn’t hear the news, Visa Inc., the largest credit card network, is preparing to go public next month under symbol V. According to terms filed with SEC, Visa plans to sell 406 million common shares in its IPO, plus additional 40.6 million shares that will be available for underwriters, priced at between [...]

The family of dividend-paying ETFs just got a little larger. State Street Global Advisors on February 12th launched a new dividend-oriented exchange-traded fund, S&P International Dividend ETF (DWX). The new fund tracks the S&P International Dividend Opportunities Index, which was introduced a month ago on January 25, 2008. According to the fund prospectus, the benchmark [...]

US stocks reversed course Wednesday, making a 240+ points swing from down 154 points to close the session up 90 points. As stocks turned around, gold also got a boost to reach a new record of $945.80 an ounce. The precious metal rallied after a government report showed that inflation picked up stem in January [...]

Do you rebalance your portfolio? If you do, how often do you rebalance? Once a year? Semi-annually? Or every quarter? Or maybe you do it whenever you think is necessary. Why Rebalance Your Portfolio The main reason for rebalancing is to maintain a portfolio’s target asset allocation. As time goes by and market moves, some [...]

Yesterday, I wrote a post on what it takes to become a millionaire, where I gave a table showing given your monthly savings and an annual rate of return, when you will have at least $1M assets (houses, cars, etc. are not included). While the table is quite straightforward, it’s not flexible enough. For example, [...]

I have had this idea on my mind for a while, but only implemented this month. The idea is to buy last month’s worst performing Chinese stock (ADR) at the beginning of the month and hold it for one money. At the end of the month, sell the stock and buy again the worst performer [...]