The Sun's Financial Diary

Online discount broker Options House is running a new promotion that will give each new customer a Dell high performance monitor for free with a new account that’s funded for at least $5,000. The promotion runs from now to July 31, 2011. During the promotional period, if you open a new Options House brokerage account [...]

Competition is always good because it gives us more choices. As we have witnessed in the brokerage industry, competition has forced more and more brokerage firms to offer commission free exchange-traded funds (ETFs) to their customers since late 2009 when Charles Schwab became the first broker to let its customers trade ETFs without commission fees. [...]

Are you an optionsXpress customer? If you are, then you probably have already heard the news coming out yesterday that optionsXpress is to be bought by Charles Schwab for $1 billion. I opened an optionsXpress account a few years ago when they gave $100 for a new account (you can still get $100 bonus now [...]

At the peak of the financial crisis in 2008, Citigroup, one of the largest financial institutions in the country, had to be bailed out by taxpayers to prevent it from collapsing. In total, the bank received $45 billion from the government through the TARP bailout fund, of which $25 billion was converted into 7.7 billions [...]

Got this promotion offer from ShareBuilder a couple of days ago. Discount broker ShareBuilder is now offering 10 free real-time trades if you open a ShareBuilder IRA account, whether it’s Traditional or Roth. If you are not familiar with ShareBuilder, which is now part of ING Direct, here’s what you will get. It basically offers [...]

I heard the news this morning that Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit bought 750,000 shares of Citigroup stock (C) on the open market yesterday when the share price dropped below $9. In addition to CEO Pandit, other three executives also bought a total of 550,000 shares. Is this the sign of confidence? Currently trading slightly above [...]

When I first purchased Bank of America (BAC) shares through its direct stock purchase plan (DSPP) at ComputerShare more than four years ago, I was solely going after its dividend. At that time, the stock was traded just below $55 with a dividend yield of 4.10%. After the initial investment, the first ever for me [...]

I have been using Quicken to track my investments for many years and feel it’s a quite convenient tool. However, my use of Quicken is just to register all the transactions. I don’t rely on it to, for example, to know how much return I have received from my investments because I found that Quicken [...]