The Sun's Financial Diary

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 [...]

Eight months ago, I bought an American Buffalo gold coin from Bullion Direct (take a look at why I chose Bullion Direct) when the price of spot gold was around $650 an ounce. With gold price reaches 27-year high, the appreciation of my gold coin is also significant. The total cost of the coin back [...]

All my efforts were wasted as November 6th came and went and my money is still sitting in my E-Trade account. Last night I logged into my account and tried to see if I could buy 1688.HK when the stock was at HK$29.90 though I knew it was almost impossible because of the rule. And [...]

One of my investment objectives is to generate passive income from investments, including dividend-paying stocks/ETFs. In the past couple of years, I have paid increasing attention to stocks that pay generous dividends. Using mostly DRIP stocks and exchange-traded funds, I have built a small portfolio aimed to generate passive income. Recently, I reshuffled that portion [...]

Chinese stocks, especially IPO stocks, are as hot as they can be, thanks to the growing appetite among investors who look Chinese stocks as a proxy to tap into Chinese economy, which is still growing at a sizzling 11.5% in the latest quarter despite measures introduced by the government to cool it off. And an [...]

In November 2004, I bought 200 shares of Microsoft. The purchase was to add some tech stocks to my investments as I had only one tech stock (Taiwan Semiconductor) and none of my mutual funds were heavy in technology companies. Though Microsoft was no longer a high-fly stock as it used to be at that [...]

I have been keeping my expectation high for the upcoming Alibaba IPO on Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Got an E-Trade Global Trading account and transferred a substantial amount of money (to me) in hoping to get a piece of it when the stock begins trading on November 6th in Hong Kong. Now it seems I [...]

The other day I read a paper on the October issue of Financial Planning magazine. The article, Think Globally by Bruce Eidelson, discussed the appeals of global REIT (real estate investment trust) to investors who seek diversifications and steady income streams, when the US real estate market struggles. One of the reasons to go global [...]