Random News: OptionsXpress Account, Citi Driver’s Edge Card, and the Surging China Sunergy

I took advantage of the $100 bonus offer from OptionsXpress last week and opened an account for myself. The process is quite simple, taking only several minutes to complete. What appeared to be a little bit concern was that when I set up the ACH transfer, it asked me the method to verify my identity, either online or by mail and the online verification probably pulled my credit history because it asked questions about my previous address. Anyway, I have funded my account with $500 and now am just waiting for the $100 free money Actually, in addition to the $100 bonus, OptionsXpress also offers a free investment book for new customers. Sweet!

Plus, OptionsXpress will give $100 or 10 free trades for each referral. If you want to have an account and need a referral, please use the contact form to send me an email. Once you open an account that meets the requirements, I will split the rewards with you by giving you a $40 Amazon.com gift card. Check out my Referrals page for details.

It didn’t take me too much longer to consider whether we should pay off our car loan. In fact, I almost immediately applied for a Citi Driver’s Edge credit card which I planed to use to pay off the loan. My application was approved and the new card arrived yesterday, but not without a little setback. I was approved for only $2,500 credit line It’s not even enough to make a down payment if I would buy a new car, let alone the $17,000 loan. Of course I am not very happy with the low limit and called Citi last night demanding an explanation why I could get only $2,500 after being a loyal customer for nearly 10 years. While they didn’t exactly give me the reason, a manager did mention that for each customer, there’s a limit on the combined credit lines. Since I already have two cards with a combined line of more than $30,000, I may be near that limit so they can only give me $2,500 this time. Well, I have to do some credit line reallocation before I can use the 12-month 0% APR balance transfer from the new card.

Finally, a bright spot in this terrible market recently is the surging China Sunergy (CSUN) shares. I bought the stock on October 10th at $13.70 apiece and saw the price plummeted to below $7.00 at the end of November. When I almost feel regret about the purchase, the stock surged more than 62% in the past two trading days as China unveiled plan to rely more clean, renewable energy including solar power.

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