The Sun's Financial Diary

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 [...]

If you’re a retirement plan investor or just someone who’s looking to sock a little money away for a later time, you may have already found out that target date mutual funds are rapidly gaining in popularity.  Target date funds, also known as life-cycle funds, are investments that are managed with a specific time frame [...]

What I like about TradeKing is not only that they have a nice web interface, excellent customer service and cash bonus promotions (the latest one just ended on January 31st), but also that they constantly roll out new products and services to improve user experience, whether it’s trading or education, with the popular discount broker. [...]

Retirement income fund is a relatively new product the mutual fund industry offers investors who want to maintain a steady stream of income when in retirement. Generally, retirement income funds, sometime also call managed payout funds, are actively managed mutual fund portfolios that consists of many individual mutual funds that can be either passive/index funds [...]

It probably comes as no surprise that investors typically don’t get the returns that are advertised by mutual funds.  Mutual fund returns assume that the investor puts their money in at the beginning of the time period and holds the investment until the end.  Investors, however, typically move their money in and out based on [...]

Apparently there are ways to buy shares of social network companies  such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, before their highly anticipated anticipated public offerings (LinkedIn could be the first of them to IPO early this year, while Facebook may go public in 2012). But there are two questions need to be answered before considering investing [...]

In such a low rate environment, you probably will need to look outside the traditional savings accounts for  a decent yield. Previously, we have discussed a few alternatives to savings accounts if you are not happy with the yield. Another option, though may be not as safe as CDs or money market accounts, is high [...]

With the new year finally upon us, you’ll no doubt find prognosticators everywhere try to tell you what they think is going to happen in the year ahead.  Fashion experts will tell you what will be big in the world of style.  Hollywood folks try to pick the year’s biggest movies.  Everybody seems to pull [...]