The Sun’s Financial Diary

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 [...]

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, [...]

OptionsHouse first came to my attention in April when I compared online discount brokers for their commissions to trade stocks, mutual funds, and options. However, at that time I didn’t get much interest in the broker at that time because back then, the commission it charges was $4.95 per stock trade, which is the same [...]

ShareBuilder isn’t the online discount broker that I would recommend.
Even though $4 per investment is quite low, the planned investment scheme itself lacks the flexibility if you want to invest at your own time, instead of a fixed day every month. In addition, the actual cost  of each investment can be rather high if only [...]

When I opened my TradeKing account in 2007,  I also got a book, The Options Playbook, from TradeKing after I expressed interest in options trading. I have bought and sold stocks for several years, but never traded options because I feel that trading options requires a little more skills than buying and selling stocks. Before [...]

General Motor (GM), the world’s largest car maker for 77 years until 2008, filed for Chapter 11 protection this morning, the same day its fellow car maker Chrysler could exit bankruptcy. The bankruptcy filing is expected after GM failed to reconstruct its debts with bondholders before the June 1 deadline imposed by the government. In [...]