The Sun's Financial Diary

Hedge funds are for wealthy investors, not for small investors like you and me. But what if you can own a piece of the hedge fund company? According to USAToday, Fortress Investment Group , which has six hedge funds with a total about $9.4 billion of assets under management, has filed paper to offer 34.3 [...]

Lifecycle funds (or target-date funds), are gaining popularity these days and become an ideal vehicle for retirement savings for people who don’t have the time or knowledge to do their own research in selecting funds to build a well diversified portfolio. With lifecycle funds, the biggest advantage is automatic asset allocation. By investing in a [...]

My first gold investment was made five years ago on February 8th, 2002, when I opened an account with Tocqueville Fund to buy $1,000 of their Tocqueville Gold Fund (TGLDX). At that time, the share price of TGLDX was $18.05. Since then, I bought TGLDX almost every month and have accumulated about 200 shares at [...]

Richard Widows of The Street.com last week published a list of 10 most diversified ETFs. The criteria used in the screening include the fund has to have at 2% exposure in 12 major industry categories: basic materials, capital goods, communications services, consumer cyclicals, consumer staples, energy, finance, health care, technology, transportation, utilities and miscellaneous. The [...]

As some popular online savings banks recently slashed their rates (GMAC from 5.25% to 5.00%, Citi e-Savings from 5.00% to 4.75%), the rates of 4-week were on the rise, at least in the first month of 2007. The rate ended 2006 at 4.742% APR. On January 30th, the rate of 4-week T-bill was 4.972%, which [...]

It has been more than a year since I reshuffled my mutual fund portfolio in 2005 when I dumped two small-cap funds and one bond fund. The only new fund I added in the past two years is ADVDX. Currently, I have a dozen funds in my taxable accounts and the asset allocation is as [...]

Back in last October, Morningstar started to offer a new gauge to measure how average investors fared over a certain period of time when investing in open-end mutual funds or ETFs. The new gauge is called Investor Return, also known as dollar-weighted return, which takes into account the total cash inflows and outflows. Before, Morningstar [...]

When I was researching at Morningstar.com for small-cap investment (both mutual funds and ETFs) yesterday, I found their ETF selection tool quite convenient. Simply place the cursor over the investment style you are interested in and click, then a list of ETFs in that category will appear with information such as style, returns, and trading [...]