The Sun's Financial Diary

In case you didn’t notice, the bullion has quietly made a comeback as stocks fell. On Friday, spot gold surged $22.20 (2.4%) to reach $927.20 an ounce, the six-month high (see the following chart from Market Club), after a government report showed that GDP contracted at an annual rate of 3.8% in the last quarter [...]

Do you know what Fibonacci rule is?
Basically, Fibonacci sequence is a sequence of numbers in which each successive number is equal to the sum of the two preceding numbers, such as 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, . . . The rule used to generated Fibonacci sequence is called Fibonacci rule, which can be [...]

When I need to check some data, such as returns and historical prices, of stocks or mutual funds, I usually use free tools such as Yahoo Finance or Morningstar. For my simple needs, those tools are enough, though what they offer are quite limited.
INO Free Stock Analysis
Recently I was informed about another free stock analysis [...]

This update is a little late for December 2008, but it’s here.
December was a good month for investors, a rare good time in a miserable year. Without the December rebound in stocks, 2008 could have been a lot worse for many people when the receive their year-end statements from brokers and mutual fund companies. Most [...]

Looks like the Wall Street doesn’t have too much confidence in Barack Obama. Why?
The day after he won the presidential election, November 5, 2008, the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 486 points. Today, the day Obama was sworn in as the 44th President of the county, the Dow tumbled 332 points, the worst inauguration day [...]

This isn’t what I asked for when I started to buy Bank of America (BAC) shares through their DRIP program at ComputerShare (ComputerShare reviews). I was going after their dividend. At $1.29 dividend payment in 2008, BAC made a small, but nice contribution to my passive income last year.
But it doesn’t look like that dividend [...]

When I first learned that Nortel Networks (NT) has sought bankruptcy protection this morning via @MarketWatch on Twitter (you can follow me on Twitter), I wasn’t really surprised (OK, a little bit). Wasn’t it just a month ago when reports came out that the company was seeking legal advices for a possible filing? Though NT [...]

Are you investing in quality, dividend paying stocks, either by buying individual stocks or investing in dividend oriented mutual funds or ETFs (exchange traded funds)?
Why Invest in Dividend Stocks?
If you are not, then I ask you to take a look at this chart from the S&P. It’s the cumulative return of $1 invested in 1930 [...]

Last week, I talked about CGM Focus Fund (CGMFX) and how the fund was hammered after oil prices plunged. Currently traded around $37 a barrel, crude oil prices have lost more than $100 since last July. Even though the OPEC has pledged deep cut in oil production, demands for oil were hampered as global [...]

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 [...]