The Sun's Financial Diary

When evaluating a mutual fund, one of the major factors I will consider is the cost of owing the fund, which includes sales charges (load, redemption fee, etc) and management fees (12b-1, administrative and management fees). Since I use Morningstar quite heavily in mutual fund research, it is my main source for a fund’s fee [...]

Morningstar.com is my primary resource for mutual funds and ETFs research for its authority in the fund industry. I have used their ETF screening tool quite extensively when I was looking for ETFs for my taxable accounts. And for all the posts on ETFs I have written (for example, the Portfolio Build with ETFs series), [...]

I never knew there’s a stock screening tools that identify stocks based on theories developed by the so-called investment gurus (somebody like Benjamin Graham) until I came across this article on Kiplinger’s Personal Finance last week. Following the link in the article, I went on to check one of the tools, Guru Screener, at Nasdaq.com, [...]

I never knew there’s a millionaire index until I read a piece news from Reuters. The index, The Spectrem Millionaire Investor Index, created by The Spectrem Group, isn’t really a measure millionaires’ wealth, but rather the sentiment of investors who have more than $500,000 or more assets in the household that can be invested. The [...]

Before a company releases its earning, financial research firms such as Thomson/FirstCall and Reuters survey fund managers and stock analysts to predict what the earning will look like. Stock prices usually move after the earning release, with magnitude depending on the outlook and how far away the true earning is different from consensus estimates. However, [...]

When I was researching at Morningstar.com for small-cap investment (both mutual funds and ETFs) yesterday, I found their ETF selection tool quite convenient. Simply place the cursor over the investment style you are interested in and click, then a list of ETFs in that category will appear with information such as style, returns, and trading [...]

I only discovered the new Yahoo Finance Chart yesterday and really like it. I used to go to place like BigChart.com for detailed, interactive charts, but now it seems I can get all I want from Yahoo. What I like the most is the way I can change the time range. At the bottom of [...]