The Sun’s Financial Diary

Mutual fund giant Vanguard Group launched a new exchanged-traded fund (ETF) last week. The Vanguard FTSE All-World ex-US Small-Cap ETF (VSS), incepted on April 2, tracks the performance of the FTSE Global Small-Cap ex-US Index. According to FTSE, the Global Small-Cap ex-US Index is a freefloat-adjusted, market-capitalization-weighted index that covers more than 3,300 small-cap stocks [...]

Last September, shortly after The Reserve Primary Fund broke the buck, the Treasury Department introduced a plan to provide temporary guarantee to money market mutual funds. The original plan was to use $50 billion from the Exchange Stabilization Fund to guarantee principal in money market mutual funds, which by design has the NAV of $1, [...]

Early this year, I compared performance of actively managed funds in my portfolio against some Vanguard index funds. In addition to the fund returns in 2008, which are all quite different between the two group of funds (four out ten funds beat Vanguard while the other six lagged), another thing I noticed from the comparison [...]

One of the two funds in my mutual fund portfolio that I don’t buy regularly is Third Avenue Estate Value Fund (TAREX), though I have owned this fund for years (the other one is Tocqueville Gold (TGLDX), but I bought TGLDX more often). When I first bought TAREX, the initial minimum investment was something like [...]

It has been more than a year since I last ran a comparison between my actively managed funds and low-cost Vanguard index funds. After the huge losses in stock markets last year, I am more interested in seeing how my funds have performed in 2008 and how they compared against Vanguard funds. To compare, I [...]

If you are a stock/mutual fund investor, you probably already felt the pain of putting your money in the stock markets in 2008. I did when I saw the 22% year-over-year decline in our net worth, even with all the new contributions we made throughout the year.
As I mentioned in the past, all our mutual [...]

A couple of days ago when I reviewed our 2008 passive income, I mentioned that CGM Focus Fund (CGMFX), which used to generate a large amount of annual capital gain/dividend in the past, only brought in this year a fraction the dividend it brought in a year ago. And that’s not the only part that [...]

Are you familiar with the idea of Lazy Portfolios?
I first read about Lazy Portfolios a few years on MarketWatch and since then have been following them. The idea of Lazy Portfolios is to use low-cost, index mutual funds to build well-diversified portfolios so that you can be “lazy” with your investments, without having to actively [...]

There are only four days left before the April 15 tax deadline, but it isn’t too late to make 2007 IRA contribution which has a limit of $4,000 ($5,000 if 50+ years old). At this time, some brokers are offering incentives to encourage people to open IRA accounts with them. For example:
Scottrade: 1-year subscription of [...]

According to a news release, mutual fund giant Vanguard has filed with SEC to offer a new, passive fund that invests in global stock markets. The Vanguard Global Stock Index Fund, which is set to be available for investors in the second quarter this year, tracks the FTSE All-World Index. The index currently covers 48 [...]