The Sun's Financial Diary

I am not sure what role, if any, I had in this, but I was just informed by Shannon Paul, the Communications Manager of PEAK6 Online, the parent company of OptionsHouse, that the discount online broker has dropped the $100 cash reserve requirement (that’s different than account minimum, which is $1,000 to open an account) [...]

I have mentioned a few time in the past that Morningstar is my primary tool when it comes to mutual fund research because, as far as I can tell, it has the broad coverage or mutual funds with the most comprehensive data of a fund. I even wrote about how to use Morningstar to research [...]

I should have done this last month for the mid-year checkup, but didn’t get time to record all the data and I had to delay the update to this month.
In the past, I have reviewed our investments, mainly taxable stock and mutual fund investment. The reason I skipped retirement investments before is that some of [...]

I bought my first stock nearly 8 years ago with Scottrade, which is also my first stock broker, in 2002 and one that I have been actively using since then. Throughout these years, as more and more online discount brokers emerged, I have also got accounts with other brokerage firms in order to reduce trading [...]

trade MONSTER is another online discount broker that generates quite some interests recently.
I first noticed trade MONSTER when I compiled the list of discount brokers with the lowest commissions for online stock trading. Actually, if you look at the list, trade MONSTER isn’t really attractive from the point of view of costs. The broker charges [...]

Nearly five months ago I started to invest through Lending Club in order to add a little bit more diversification to my investments. Since then, I have been steadily building up my portfolio. The process is rather slow though since I can only buy notes on the secondary market, which I sometimes forgot to do [...]

I opened an OptionsHouse brokerage account a few weeks ago after noticing that it has lowered its online stock trade commission to $2.95/trade. That price beats what I currently get from other popular discount brokers, such as TradeKing, Firstrade, and even Zecco. However, since OptionsHouse requires some paperwork (such as a signed form and voided [...]

I opened a brokerage account with optionsXpress back in 2007 when they ran a promotion that gave $100 bonus for a new account. Since then I have been running an optionsXpress referral program for people who want to receive some incentives to open an account with the broker (you can get $100 bonus, which is [...]

The U.S. House of Representatives narrowly passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (ACES) on June 26, 2009. The act mandates a 17% reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from 2005 level by 2020. It also requires that by 2020 more than 20% the nation’s electricity should be generated from reusable sources, [...]

Nowadays, you won’t find many credit card issuers who are willing to give you 12 months of free loans (0% APR for 12 months) and even if there are card companies can give you 0% APR for 12 months, they usually charge at least 3% if you use the card to make balance transfer (the [...]