The Sun's Financial Diary

Good changes are coming to ShareBuilder after ING Direct bought the online discount brokerage firm a month ago.
An email from ShareBuilder over the weekend informed me that starting December 17th, the cost of trading securities at real time at ShareBuilder will be at a flat fee of $9.95 for both market and limit orders. ShareBuilder [...]

I received an email from Zecco yesterday, announcing the re-launch of their Zecco Friend Program. The program is actually a referral program which allows existing Zecco customers to earn cash rewards for recommending the service to friends. Here’s how it works:
As the holiday season approaches, we’re sure you’d appreciate more cash to buy gifts for [...]

In the third part of the 2007 Consumer Reports Ultimate Money Guide, a method was provided by the magazine on how to beat the broad market index, which is repeated in the following:

No-load: Look at no-load funds only.
Low-fee: Identify those with lowest expense ratios.
High-asset: Keep those with the most assets under management.
Long-tenure: Get rid of [...]

Investors who look for incomes from diversified international equities have one more option to choose from.
Early last week, First Trust launched a new global dividend ETF, the Dow Jones Global Select Dividend Index Fund, joining other international dividend-paying ETFs. The fund started trading on November 27th under ticker symbol FGD. The underlying index of [...]

An email from ShareBuilder reached my mailbox tonight with some “exciting” announcement: ShareBuilder has been acquired by ING Direct on November 15, 2007. Along with the announcement, ShareBuilder also told its customers what change they can expect after the transaction: none.
Rest assured there have been no changes made to your ShareBuilder account. All of the [...]

As E-Trade’s stock bounced back to $5+ level, it seems the bankruptcy rumor has calmed down a little bit. Actually, instead of going out of business, E-Trade may become a take-over target (that speculation played a big role in driving up the stock price).
Anyway, today I received an email from E-Trade regarding my account with [...]

Another big story yesterday (the other one I thought was the 170+ points reversal of the Dow, extending the index’s losing streak to 4 and closing below 13,000 the first time since late August) was the nearly 60% drop of E-Trade Financial shares. Following a Citigroup analyst downgrade of the stock to Sell over the [...]

One of my investment objectives is to generate passive income from investments, including dividend-paying stocks/ETFs. In the past couple of years, I have paid increasing attention to stocks that pay generous dividends. Using mostly DRIP stocks and exchange-traded funds, I have built a small portfolio aimed to generate passive income. Recently, I reshuffled that portion [...]

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 [...]

Do you like lifecycle funds? Do you use them in your portfolio?
I am not a big fan of lifecycle funds as I only use one in my entire investments, including both regular and retirement accounts. The reason is the lack of flexibility of such funds. However, lifecycle funds are getting popular among investors who opt [...]