Reading Time: < 1 minute Finally St. Louis gas price is exceeding $3 a gallon. Today marks the first day my gas bill exceeded $40 ($3.179 * 13.105 gallons = $41.66). I am not complaining, as I know people around the world are paying a much higher price for gas, or paying a higher percentage of their disposal income for
Reading Time: 2 minutes Yesterday was a quite amazing day for stock market. The US market (Dow, S&P, and Nasdaq) went up the most in 5 years, after the dear friend of Wall Street (Mr. Ben Bernanke) cut the interest rate by 0.75%. Here are details in the news (Dow 416 points gain, Fed rate cut sends market soaring).
Reading Time: < 1 minute I closed the Amazon Feb $65 puts last Wed, when I saw the stock dropped to around $68, which is the low point the day after it released Q4 earning. Lesson learned: 1) short/put a stock is much harder than I thought. I started this trade because I saw EDU, AAPL, and VMW all dropped
Reading Time: < 1 minute Last week I received the new credit card from CitiBank, which I immediately put it in use by transfering some of the high interest (7.75%) debt in my HELOC to this account. Note this 0% offer is valid for one year. I found out this offer from MyMoneyBlog. I have done credit card balance transfer
Reading Time: < 1 minute 401k My new 401k plan did first purchase yesterday. I got 0.47 shares of company stock plus other mutual funds. If this rate holds, I am going to get 12 shares this year 🙂 MasterCard CCF settlement I registered for $25 settlement fees. Now waiting its arrival to my mail box…I understand it will take
Reading Time: < 1 minute I picked the following funds (and their weight) for my Vanguard IRA yesterday. Vanguard International Value 50% (developed market large cap value) Vanguard Winsor II 25% (US large cap value) Vanguard Selected Value 25% (US mid cap value) The first two funds are in my current 401k plan, I found the Vanguard Selected Value through
Reading Time: < 1 minute Roll over IRA In early Nov. I received a letter from Vanguard, it says I am eligible to transfer some of my 401k to an IRA account. I thought about it, the pros and cons, and decided to do it yesterday. Here are my rationale: 1) Ideally I like to keep all my retirement in
Reading Time: 2 minutes No I haven not changed my employer or anything, but my company was acquired by a global 50 company this year, and from next year we will have new 401k plan. Currently my 401k is in Vanguard and I am happy with them so far. One advantage with Vanguard is they have the lowest fees
Reading Time: 2 minutes Yum Brand, the parent co. of KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell, had a great quarter yesterday, thanks to the loyal customers in China flocking to KFC and Pizza hut. Maybe because they think the steamed bun in Beijing are unsafe? Yesterday I heard about this Big Mac index (link to Economist) from NPR. This
Reading Time: < 1 minute I prefer value fund in my 401K. This is from what I read (don’t remember exactly where) and from looking at the returns of funds in my 401K. Barrons’ statistics confirmed this. The worst growth fund is large cap growth. I don’t have any of those. Go “values” 🙂
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