The Sun’s Financial Diary

I did. Did you?
I called my broker Scottrade this morning when the markets opened, but had to wait nearly 20 minutes before my called was transferred to Scottrade’s national service center instead being answered by brokers at my local office. I never had problem contacting them before.
When my call eventually went through, I was told [...]

The family of dividend-paying ETFs just got a little larger.
State Street Global Advisors on February 12th launched a new dividend-oriented exchange-traded fund, S&P International Dividend ETF (DWX). The new fund tracks the S&P International Dividend Opportunities Index, which was introduced a month ago on January 25, 2008. According to the fund prospectus, the benchmark consists [...]

Nowadays, you can get a lot of stuff for free, news, music, movie, as long as you read/listen to/watch the ads that come together with the free stuff. You can even monitor your credit score for free, says CreditKarma.com, a newly launched credit monitoring service that promise free access to their own version of credit [...]

There was a short Q&A in The Wall Street Journal yesterday where the question being asked is the following:
I would like to buy only a few stocks in certain companies. Are there any online brokers that handle people with only a couple hundred dollars in their account and don’t charge heavy fees for infrequent traders?
In [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

I am currently using several brokerage accounts and each of them has its own *unique* features. For example, I use Firstrade for stocks that pays dividend (such as MO), but it charges $6.95 per trade, E-Trade for stocks listed in Hong Kong, and QQQDirect to buy QQQQ without commission (find out more in my brokerage [...]

It seems to me that Zecco doesn’t have a clear plan on how to run their business.
First, they asked a ton of paperwork to open an account, then ran a promotion with a lowered minimum requirement that didn’t want anybody to know, shortly after the secret promotion, they decided to get rid of all the [...]

But not with a price, a very high price.
Back in February when I first heard that E-Trade is going to introduce a global trading service to allow investors to trade stocks listed in other markets directly, I signed up to receive notification when it becomes available. Yesterday, the email came, announcing that the new E-Trade [...]