The Sun's Financial Diary

China residential real estate service company, E-House Holdings, is scheduled to debut on NYSE today under symbol EJ. From the company website, E-House’s business includes “real estate agency services, secondary real estate brokerage services and real estate consulting and information services.” Based in Shanghai, China’s financial capital, E-House employs more than 1800 real estate brokers [...]

Several years ago, I invested in a mutual fund called Arbitrage Fund (ARBFX) for a short period of time (less than two years). The reason for me to get into this fund was that the fund’s investment strategy is different from any other funds I invested in and I was looking for an investment with [...]

Unlike our taxable investments which consist of quite a large number of mutual funds, ETFs, and stocks, I try to maintain a small number of funds in our IRA accounts and use mostly Vanguard index funds to keep the expenses low. Among the total of 10 funds in our IRA investments, we own Vanguard Total [...]

Vanguard launched a new international equity ETF on July 26, 2007. The latest offering, Vanguard Europe Pacific ETF (VEA), tracks Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI) Europe, Australasia, Far East (EAFE) Index. The index comprises 21 developed economies (PDF file) outside of North America, including Japan, United Kingdom, France, Switzerland, Germany, Australia, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Sweden, [...]

It was just two weeks ago I was all smile when the Dow gained 283 points in one day on its way to the 14,000 mark, which was reached exactly one week ago today. That gain, however, was all but gone as the index lost 527 points in the past 5 sessions. Markets in earning [...]

As I stated before, my investment objective is to generate passive incomes from investments. To reach that goal, I am trying to build a portfolio with dividend-paying stocks and mutual funds/ETFs. Among my dividend generators, one that I particularly like is Alpine Dynamic Dividend Fund (ADVDX). I started investing in ADVDX in April 2006 and [...]

have doubled When I checked with Quicken last night, I found that our investments in Dodge & Cox International Fund (DODFX) have gained 100%, the first fund in my collection that has posted triple digits return. I purchased my first share of DODFX on June 9, 2003 at $17.41. Since then, I have been making [...]

In my Pay Ourselves First post, I made the argument of starting investing right away even when one is paying a credit card debt with 18% interest rate: While it makes a lot of sense to target the debt that charges some 18% interest rate first, I feel that investing should never be delayed even [...]