The Sun's Financial Diary

In the April issue of Kiplinger’s Personal Finance Magazine, there’s an article, Why stokcs are a Bargain, by James K. Glassman and a section of the paper is devoted to the discussion of which is riskier, bonds or stocks. The article uses the following examples to show what investors can expect by investing in various [...]

The following questions were left at my recent post on 4-week T-bill rate: When the 4 week period is over what happens to the money invested? Do you reinvest the money along with the interest earned ? Also what kind of tax document do they provide (1099 etc) and does that show the details for [...]

This is the third segment of the Model Portfolios Built with ETFs series. In the first two parts, I discussed two model portfolios, the Couch Potato Portfolio and the Bogel Head Portfolio, and considered possible choices to build these portfolios with ETFs instead of transitional mutual funds. In this part, I continue the discussion with [...]

Since the start of 2007, the rates of 4-week Treasury bill have been on the rise. Last week’s auction set the latest investment rate at 5.247% APR. If this rate is converted to annual yield, the APY is 5.376%. Since interests earned from T-bill investments are exempted from state income taxes, the equivalent yield (EAPY) [...]

I originally thought I should wait some time before jumping in on Xinhua Finance Media (XFML). Well, I did wait, but not for long. Around 3:00 pm yesterday when I saw the stock lost almost two dollars to around $11 per share from its open price, I placed an order and bought 360 shares XFML [...]

Xinhua Finance Media Ltd (XFML) went ahead its scheduled IPO Friday despite recent sharp decline of Chinese stocks, but the reception of this latest offering on the street was nothing but cold. Before the IPO, there were speculations that XFML may scrape its plan in wake of the plunge of Chinese domestic stocks on February [...]

The recent market plunge has generated quite some debate among PF bloggers what we should do (if we should do anything at all) with our investments in the event that major indexes lost 5% in just a couple of days: Should we see it as a buying opportunity? Should we re-evaluate our investment strategy? Or [...]

This is the second part of the Invest in Gold series. In the first part, I compared several gold dealers, mainly from the angle of price (price of the gold, shipping fees, and insurance charges), and the direct outcome of that research was the purchase of a gold coin myself last week from Bullion Direct. [...]