The Sun's Financial Diary

I have been a loyal customer of Scottrade for more than 5 years. Though I have opened a number of brokerage accounts during that time period, Scottrade remains my primary broker holding most of our investable assets. There are reasons for me to stick with Scottrade (Scottrade 3 free trades offer). Last week, Scottrade informed [...]

Investors will soon be able to invest in Oakmark’s two international funds again. I received an email from Oakmark Fund yesterday which announces that two previously closed international funds, International Fund I (OAKIX) and International Small Cap Fund (OAKEX) will re-open to new investors on January 2, 2008. Both funds are managed by David Herro, [...]

At first, I was very excited when Alibaba.com announced its IPO on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in early November, but then only to be disappointed by a regulatory procedure which blocks any purchase by US investors of any foreign IPOs within the first 40 days of trading. At that time, I thought I might [...]

Good changes are coming to ShareBuilder after ING Direct bought the online discount brokerage firm a month ago. An email from ShareBuilder over the weekend informed me that starting December 17th, the cost of trading securities at real time at ShareBuilder will be at a flat fee of $9.95 for both market and limit orders. [...]

A while ago, I had a post on using XTF’s ETF Finder to find ETFs that belong to the same sector. I like that tool because it allows me to see all the competitors of a particular fund and gives me all the information I need on one page. Recently (less than two months actually), [...]

So now E-Trade Financial seems out of the immediate danger of going out of business, they want to show their appreciation to those customers who chose to stay with them after the firm revealed big losses from subprime mortgage loans and saw their stock sink more than 50% in one day. An email from E-Trade [...]

In the third part of the 2007 Consumer Reports Ultimate Money Guide, a method was provided by the magazine on how to beat the broad market index, which is repeated in the following: No-load: Look at no-load funds only. Low-fee: Identify those with lowest expense ratios. High-asset: Keep those with the most assets under management. [...]

Did you ever wonder why the prices of bullion coins containing the same amount of gold are different and how they are determined? Yesterday, I read an article on GoodSeek.com (I also subscribe to their free daily Gold Seeker Report, which provides a nice summary of the precious market) that explains the prices discrepancy among [...]