The Sun’s Financial Diary

This is the second part of the Model Portfolio Built with ETFs series, which convert Jonathan’s Model Portfolios into all-ETF portfolios. In this part (the first part can be found here), I looked at the four example portfolios in The Bogleheads’ Guide to Investing [Amazon.com affiliate link] and examined ways to reconstruct these portfolios [...]

Last month, Jonathan at MyMoneyBlog ran a series on model portfolios which covered some (so far six) popular portfolios based on various investment philosophies. When these model portfolios were originally developed (some are more than thirty years old), the main investment vehicles were mutual funds, where were apparently the only choices at that time. [...]

In the past couple of days, I did some further study on VFINX after I took a look at the market value and shares owned at the beginning of 2007 if I started investment in January 1988 with four different investment schemes (here’s the previous post). In this study, I use VFINX as a dollar-cost [...]

This is definitely the first time I ever checked the total passive income generated in the middle of the year. I usually crunch the numbers once a year when I fill the tax returns. Out of curiosity, I spent nearly an hour last night and summarized the money that are generated by money for 2006 [...]

If you are a mutual fund investor, chances are you have seen Morningstar’s star rating every where, on fund family’s website, on Yahoo! Finance (where you can find a comprehensive list of funds and fund families), even on funds’ ads. Common sense tells us a fund with five stars should outperform a two-star fund, the [...]

BUFSX has been part of my taxable investment portfolio since the beginning of 2002 when I started to invest. Since then, I have been dollar-cost-averaging $100 into this fund every month and the fund’s return was superior: 51.2% in 2003 and 28.8% in 2004 according to Morningstar.
However, the fund started to lag not only [...]

I owned Vanguard Wellington Fund in my IRA account with Scottrade since 2001 and I am very happy with the fund’s performance. The only problem I have is Scottrade.
I have both my taxable account and retirement account with Scottrade for more than five years, and they used to be very good: low fee, online [...]