The Sun's Financial Diary

Investors who look for incomes from diversified international equities have one more option to choose from. Early last week, First Trust launched a new global dividend ETF, the Dow Jones Global Select Dividend Index Fund, joining other international dividend-paying ETFs. The fund started trading on November 27th under ticker symbol FGD. The underlying index of [...]

First of all, what are defensive stocks? According to Investorwords.com: A stock that tends to remain stable under difficult economic conditions. Defensive stocks include food, tobacco, oil, and utilities. These stocks hold up in hard times because demand does not decrease as dramatically as it may in other sectors. Defensive stocks tend to lag behind [...]

Early this month, there’s an article on Morningstar.com discussing the allocation of stocks and bonds in an investment portfolio. Determining the right mix of stocks and bonds depends on many factors, such as age, risk tolerance, and return expectation. For aggressive investors with longer time horizon, they can afford to put a large port of [...]

Besides homeowners who lost their homes through foreclosure, another victim in this sub-prime mortgage crisis is the lenders which provided the loans, including the nation’s largest banks which also exposed themselves to investments tied to bad loans. The financial sector was hit very hard and the steep decline of financial shares since the summer also [...]

An email from ShareBuilder reached my mailbox tonight with some “exciting” announcement: ShareBuilder has been acquired by ING Direct on November 15, 2007. Along with the announcement, ShareBuilder also told its customers what change they can expect after the transaction: none. Rest assured there have been no changes made to your ShareBuilder account. All of [...]

As E-Trade’s stock bounced back to $5+ level, it seems the bankruptcy rumor has calmed down a little bit. Actually, instead of going out of business, E-Trade may become a take-over target (that speculation played a big role in driving up the stock price). Anyway, today I received an email from E-Trade regarding my account [...]

Another big story yesterday (the other one I thought was the 170+ points reversal of the Dow, extending the index’s losing streak to 4 and closing below 13,000 the first time since late August) was the nearly 60% drop of E-Trade Financial shares. Following a Citigroup analyst downgrade of the stock to Sell over the [...]

Chinese stocks have been hit pretty hard lately, no matter where the stocks are listed, US, Hong Kong, or mainland China. To get a sense of how bad things have been recently, take a look at these numbers: Hang Seng Index (^HSI) is currently at 27,588, down more than 4,000 points from the peak of [...]