The Sun's Financial Diary

This week’s auction result put the interest rate of 4-week T-Bills at 5.146%, better than what EmigrantDirect and HSBC offer (5%). For second straight week, the rates are above 5%, making T-Bills more attractive now than a month ago. And I decided to jump back in again. Well, considering that I have only canceled the [...]

I became a big fan of ETFs (Exchange Traded Funds) in December 2004 when I sold my Matthews China Fund (MCHFX) holdings at Scottrade after it started to charge fees for no-load mutual funds and switched to PowerShares’ Golden Dragon Halter USX China (PGJ), 10 days after its inception. Now I own seven PowerShares ETFs, [...]

Every day? Every week? or Every month? When I first started investing in 2001, I was so eager to see how my investments (mutual funds) were doing, I just couldn’t wait till 6 o’clock in the eventing to get the closing prices. So I entered the top 10 or 15 holdings of each mutual funds [...]

Due to the apparent delay of our Roth IRA transfer process at Vanguard, I decided to mail the checks ($1000 each) to Scottrade for our forth quarter Roth IRA contributions. When I started the transfer process at the end of last month, I thought it could be done before the next quarterly automatic investment date [...]

It seems that Zecco not only offers free equity trade for an account with a balance of $2500 or more, but they also have free dividend reinvestment. The following is from Zecco’s FAQ section: Does Zecco Trading allow account holders to automatically reinvest dividends for equities and exchange traded funds? Yes, dividend reinvestment is a [...]

I have always wanted to buy stocks from companies directly instead of going through a middle-man and paying anywhere from $4 to $7 per trade. However, I never knew where to go and how to start. So the plan has been put off and I really didn’t actively pursue the idea. Then last night, I [...]

Exactly one month ago, I canceled our $3000 weekly 4-Week T-Bill purchase after the interest rate dropped to 4.757%, far less than the 5.15% APY we earned from EmigrantDirect at that time. In the past month, we have seen changes on both the banking and T-Bill fronts and the new developments made me wonder if [...]

Recently, Zecco started offering equity free trade for customers with $2,500 or more in their accounts. While this news certainly got my attention considering that I am now paying from $4 to $7 for each stock trade, there was one question that I didn’t find answer from their posts: there’s no mention of dividend reinvestment. [...]