stlplace

New 401k in Vanguard
Two weeks into working for new employer, today I am able to make my 401k selections from Vanguard. Sweet! It only took me a few minutes to make my choices:
(30%) S&P 500 index fund (VFINX)
(30%) Winsor II (VWNFX)
(40%) International value (VTRIX)
If there is one thing I learned from the recent market drop, […]

Happened to see this from CBS evening news today. The story is titled “Credit Crunch Takes New Face”, and it talks about the credit card crunch for average consumer.
“The average American has nine credit cards and owes more than $16,000, not including mortgages…This decade, real wages went up 4 percent while credit card debt […]

NOT TO DO list first
1) Watch CNBC and other financial news and got confused, and worse got panic. Same goes to checking your brokerage acct or 401k acct every day;
2) Try to be the hero: pick up “cheap” financials, commodities, technology stocks simply because you think they are “cheap” compared to 2 weeks ago (without […]

I think I found the root cause of this whole financial crisis, just like the Wall Street investment banks, hedge funds, AIG (NYSE:AIG), Washington Mutual (NYSE:WM), the problem is American home buyers/consumers are overly leveraged. Note I used the word home buyers, not owners, because theoritically the banks (oh, to be precise, the Chinese, the […]

This year I have used all the three appoaches to communicate with IRS for my (our joint) federal income tax matter. Things have been mostly resolved now. But looking back I think I could use the IRS local office more often. Each appoach has its pros and cons, here are my takes on each appoach.
Mail
Probablly […]

401k
Last week my old 401k at Vanguard was merged to my new 401k. I don’t know if you paid attention to your 401k or IRA lately, not a fun thing to do. I did a quick calculation, my old 401k portfolio lost 7.56% of its value from Dec 31 2007 to July 7 2008 when […]

I printed out the CFA exam admission ticket yesterday, the test will be hold on June 7. Still got to read up the economics (my least favorite topic). So far I have read “financial management and statement analysis”, “quatitive methods”, “equity analysis and portfolio management”, and I’ve almost completed the “Options and derivatives”. Another thing […]

Kiplinger is a personal finance magazine I have since year 2001. In its May 08 issue, I found “Tune out the seers” (Promised Land column) by Andrew Feinberg, in which he is saying everyone (especially experts) likes to predict the market and economy, but we should just ignore them. Or in the case of famous […]

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 […]

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). […]