The Sun's Financial Diary

Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway filed its first quarter 13-F with the SEC last week. From the filing, you may find a few investment ideas from where Buffet is putting his money, as noted by Morningstar. At the end of the first quarter, Berkshire holds a total of 41 stocks in its equity portfolio, with American [...]

Many industrial groups got hurt pretty badly in this one and a half year long recession. Banks, homebuilders, retailers, just to name a few. However, the recession has also proven to be an opportunity for others to bloom in this environment because when the wallet got tight, we cut our spending: we postpone purchase of [...]

The S&P 500 Index lost about 46% between August 2008 and September 2002 when the internet bubble burst. Then it took the benchmark 5 years to reach a new all-time high in October 2007. Then there came the subprime mortgage crisis, the collapse of the housing market and the financial market, eventually, the recession. In [...]

I am by no means a trader. I am not always looking for stocks to buy. However, since last October when the stock market started to sink, I have been active, relatively, on trading stocks. In fact, stocks I bought and sold since October 2008 are more than the total number of trades I did [...]

Prosper, once the largest operator of peer-to-peer lending until it shut down its operation in October 2008 amid regulatory scrutiny, has relaunched yesterday and now it’s called Prosper Loans Marketplace, with a twist on how to lend and borrow. However, since the Prosper is still in the process of completing registration with the Security and [...]

The U.S. IPO market is pretty much dried up. In 2008, a total of 43 companies went public, only 8 in the second half of the year, according to a report from Renaissance Capital, as the crisis in the financial market forced companies abandon plans to go public. So far in 2009, only 2 initial [...]

Last weekend, I shared a video from INO which examined the rally of the Dow Jones Industrial Average occurred in the past couple of weeks and concluded that it was just a temporary bounce in a down market. This week, INO released another educational video for its take on the recent gains of the S&P [...]

Have you read The Intelligent Investor and Security Analysis by Benjamin Graham? These two books are considered as must read for value investing, but they are all pretty heavy books, especially the Security Analysis. If you just want to grab the essentials of the books, then  there’s on article on Forbes about Graham’s three timeless [...]