The Sun's Financial Diary

When something seems too good to be true, it probably either is or won’t last long in case it is true. And what happened to Zecco Trading in the past few years just serves as a perfect example. Zecco, an online discount broker whose name stands for ZEro Commission COst, started in 2006 by offering its customer [...]

Online discount broker OptionsHouse is offering free 1-year subscription to Barrons.com when you open a brokerage account with the firm. This promotion is similar to the 1-year free WSJ.com subscription that OptionsHouse offered last year. Basically, you open an OptionsHouse account, make an initial deposit of $1,000 ore more, then receive a complimentary 1-year subscription [...]

I have been using Lending Club to build a small alternative investment portfolio since early 2009. One of the reasons that I got into peer-to-peer lending, though I have initially resisted the idea, is that the returns I got from savings account were just too low. In the past two years since I started, I have [...]

Last year, I made some changes to a portion of my wife’s IRA account that’s held at Scottrade. What I did was I sold a couple of mutual funds I still owned in the account and bought one ETF instead. For the past few years, I have used Scottrade’s systematic purchase plan to buy shares of [...]

As the markets approach two years of gains, the question inevitably becomes where it heads from here.  Can the market continue to manufacture meaningful and sustainable returns or has this been just another bear market bounce that will eventually lead us back to where we were before? Both experts and individual investors like to use [...]

Prosper, one of the leading peer-to-peer lending providers, is celebrating its 5th Birthday on Thursday, February 17th, by making the second payment up to $300 for you if you become a borrower on February 17th and list a loan. Prosper recently lowered borrower rates. Now individuals with excellent credit can 1-year borrow personal loans through [...]

Exactly one year ago, Fidelity announced that it started to offer commission free ETFs to its customers. At that time, a total of 25 ETFs were provided to Fidelity brokerage account customers free of commission charges. Apparently, Fidelity’s move, together with Charles Schweb’s commission free offers of its own ETFs earlier, added fire to the [...]

A large portion of our taxable investments are held in 10 mutual funds (check out my 2010 Year in Review for a list of mutual funds we currently own and asset allocation at the end of 2010). Though it has been a long time since I made any change to our mutual fund investments, I [...]