The Sun's Financial Diary

The first time I heard that Alibaba.com was planning for an initial share sale this year was in 2005 when Baidu.com went public. Since then, I have been following news about Alibaba.com’s initial public offering with a lot of interests because I knew I want a piece of it (maybe I should have bought some [...]

Last week, when I went through Kiplinger’s 2007 Best List, one of the surprises to me was their choice of the best online broker for fund investors, which went to Muriel Siebert, a broker that I have never heard of until I read the magazine. Kiplinger gave a brief explanation why this particular broker won [...]

Do you like lifecycle funds? Do you use them in your portfolio? I am not a big fan of lifecycle funds as I only use one in my entire investments, including both regular and retirement accounts. The reason is the lack of flexibility of such funds. However, lifecycle funds are getting popular among investors who [...]

I am currently using several brokerage accounts and each of them has its own *unique* features. For example, I use Firstrade for stocks that pays dividend (such as MO), but it charges $6.95 per trade, E-Trade for stocks listed in Hong Kong, and QQQDirect to buy QQQQ without commission (find out more in my brokerage [...]

Gold price has risen sharply in the past month, going up from $680 an ounce on September 5, to $741 on October 5. One of the reasons that pushed gold to 28-year high was the recent Fed rate cut and speculations that there will be one more reduction in federal funds rate before the year [...]

It feels like it was just yesterday that lot of *advices* were floating around in the personal finance blog community on how you should get out of the markets if the 1000+ points drop of the Dow (the Dow as 14,000 on July 19 and 12,845 on August 16) made you sweating and get up [...]

I have a previous post that compared my actively managed funds against Vanguard funds for a 5-year period that covered most of the time I invested in those funds. The purpose of the post was to have an idea whether actively managed funds, while costing a little more to own, indeed lagged low-cost index funds [...]

Early last week, the Yale endowment, one of the nation’s largest college fund, reported an annual return of 28% from its investment for the fiscal year ended June 30th. According to YaleDailyNews.com, the Yale endowment has returned 17.8% annually over the past decade (in 2000 the fund returned 41%), leading other large rivals such as [...]