The Sun's Financial Diary

Nowadays, there are many online discount brokers to choose from if you want to open a brokerage account and begin trading stocks and/or options on you own. Of course, every broker is different in many ways including fees, services, and tools, and there are lots of things to compare and contrast before the final decision [...]

Recently, I wrote about that in general mutual fund management fees have been falling in the past two decades. The management fee, in terms of expense ratio (ER), is the fee that mutual fund companies charge their customers for owning the fund. This is significant because, as I mentioned in the article, management fees are paid by investors [...]

Look at that! Yesterday, hours after I wrote an article on SmartMoney’s 2012 Best Brokers Survey, in which I wondered how come Zecco and TradeKing were ranked next to each other in the magazine’s annual rating, an email from Zecco arrived, with the subject line “Zecco and TradeKing Are Merging”. I have to say that [...]

I have followed SmartMoney Maganize’s annual survey of online discount stock brokers for some time, writing the first post about the survey in 2009. In the past, when I looked at the ranking of best and worst brokers, there were always some surprises, especially when brokers I have never heard of were thrown in the [...]

From what I heard, it will be coming this fall. I have been a loyal Scottrade customer for nearly 10 years. During this time, I have opened trading accounts with multiple brokers, each of which has its own services and features, but Scottrade has always been my primary broker for most of the trades I [...]

In terms of expense ratio. When it comes to selecting what mutual funds to buy, one of the important factors to consider is how much they will cost you to own the funds. When buying stocks, I would generally want to go with the broker that charges less commission for each trade. The reason is [...]

I have always wanted to build a portfolio consisting of dividend-paying stocks that could generate passive income for us in the long term. The plan is to continuously investing in stocks with high dividend yield such that distributions from the portfolio will someday make up a significant portion of our income when we can no [...]

One of the earliest articles I wrote about investing in mutual funds was how to understand Morningstar Star Rating system and use it to research mutual funds.  It has been a while since that article was written and I haven’t added any new fund to my taxable investment accounts for years, so I haven’t used [...]