The Sun's Financial Diary

First of all, what are defensive stocks? According to Investorwords.com: A stock that tends to remain stable under difficult economic conditions. Defensive stocks include food, tobacco, oil, and utilities. These stocks hold up in hard times because demand does not decrease as dramatically as it may in other sectors. Defensive stocks tend to lag behind [...]

Besides homeowners who lost their homes through foreclosure, another victim in this sub-prime mortgage crisis is the lenders which provided the loans, including the nation’s largest banks which also exposed themselves to investments tied to bad loans. The financial sector was hit very hard and the steep decline of financial shares since the summer also [...]

All my efforts were wasted as November 6th came and went and my money is still sitting in my E-Trade account. Last night I logged into my account and tried to see if I could buy 1688.HK when the stock was at HK$29.90 though I knew it was almost impossible because of the rule. And [...]

Chinese stocks, especially IPO stocks, are as hot as they can be, thanks to the growing appetite among investors who look Chinese stocks as a proxy to tap into Chinese economy, which is still growing at a sizzling 11.5% in the latest quarter despite measures introduced by the government to cool it off. And an [...]

In November 2004, I bought 200 shares of Microsoft. The purchase was to add some tech stocks to my investments as I had only one tech stock (Taiwan Semiconductor) and none of my mutual funds were heavy in technology companies. Though Microsoft was no longer a high-fly stock as it used to be at that [...]

I have been keeping my expectation high for the upcoming Alibaba IPO on Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Got an E-Trade Global Trading account and transferred a substantial amount of money (to me) in hoping to get a piece of it when the stock begins trading on November 6th in Hong Kong. Now it seems I [...]

The first time I heard that Alibaba.com was planning for an initial share sale this year was in 2005 when Baidu.com went public. Since then, I have been following news about Alibaba.com’s initial public offering with a lot of interests because I knew I want a piece of it (maybe I should have bought some [...]

It feels like it was just yesterday that lot of *advices* were floating around in the personal finance blog community on how you should get out of the markets if the 1000+ points drop of the Dow (the Dow as 14,000 on July 19 and 12,845 on August 16) made you sweating and get up [...]