The Sun’s Financial Diary

Despite the relatively high commission cost (Scottrade charges $7 for each online stock order, market or limit), I have been using Scottrade for years and it’s my primary stock broker, not only because of its excellent customer service, but also that I can actually trade with Scottrade for free. That’s right, I don’t pay [...]

I am by no means a trader. I am not always looking for stocks to buy. However, since last October when the stock market started to sink, I have been active, relatively, on trading stocks. In fact, stocks I bought and sold since October 2008 are more than the total number of trades I did [...]

I mentioned early this month that I bought 600 shares of Citigroup (C) on the day when the stock was traded below $1 for the first time ever. From where the stock is traded now (it closed at $3.08/share on March 18, 2009), it seems that my bet is a good one, even though I [...]

I traded more stocks in 2008 than all I did in the past few years. Not that I suddenly became an active trader or anything like that. In fact, I have long been a buy and hold type of investor and I still am. Sometime, I felt that I may have been too buy-and-hold with [...]

With the stock market as volatile as it can be, I decided to take advantage of stocks’ slump recently to make a few quick bucks. I had a “play account” at Zecco to make speculative stock purchase (sadly, that account is close to nothing right now), but this time I am using Scottrade instead because [...]