The Sun's Financial Diary

This is the second part of my weekend reading: Aspects of Investor Psychology. In the first part, the focus was on overconfidence in investor’s decision making process. The topic of this part is optimism in investing of both financial advisors and investors like you and me. Take a look at the following question: Question 2: [...]

If you are a mutual fund investor, chances are you have seen Morningstar’s star rating every where, on fund family’s website, on Yahoo! Finance (where you can find a comprehensive list of funds and fund families), even on funds’ ads. Common sense tells us a fund with five stars should outperform a two-star fund, the [...]

Since we were forced to stay at home because of the storm, I decided to pull out a paper I printed out sometime ago and but didn’t have time to read. The paper, Aspects of Investor Psychology, by D. Kahneman and M. Riepe, is not new (published in 1998 in Journal Portfolio Management), but it [...]

New Oriental Education (EDU) will be the latest Chinese stock to be listed on the big board. According to IPOHome.com, EDU will offer 7.5 million American Depositary Shares (ADS) at a range of $11-$13 and the stock will start to trade on Wednesday, September 6. EDU’s main business is test preparation. As tens of thousands [...]

I came cross an article about global water shortage on BBC News today. The main message of the article is that water shortage, which is usually seen as a developing country problem, now posses a threat to both rich and poor countries alike. This reminds me an article I read early this year on MarketWatch [...]

I bought another 320 shares of Nortel Network, at $1.99, with some dividend money accumulated in my Scottrade account. This brings the totoal number of shares I owned to 2720. Since early 2002, I have been on and off with NT several times and when I first bought NT in 2002, the shares were traded [...]

Buffalo Small-Cap Value Fund (BUFSX) has been part of my taxable investment portfolio since the beginning of 2002 when I started to invest in mutual funds. Since then, I have been dollar-cost-averaging $100 into this fund every month and the fund’s returns in the past has been very impressive: 51.2% in 2003 and 28.8% in [...]

I owned Vanguard Wellington Fund (VWELX) in my IRA account with Scottrade since 2001 and I am very happy with the fund’s performance. The only problem I have is Scottrade. I have both my taxable account and retirement account with Scottrade for more than five years, and they used to be very good: low fee, online [...]