Reading Time: 2 minutes 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
Reading Time: < 1 minute 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.
Reading Time: < 1 minute 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
Reading Time: < 1 minute 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
Reading Time: 2 minutes 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
Reading Time: 2 minutes My wife used to joked with me: you always tout some stocks when you buy, then after it crashed, you will say it’s a crap (XFML, Heelys, LFT, Crocs). I think I won’t say that for Mindray, and hopefully no hard feelings for BRK, either. Sold Mindray MR I sold my remaining Mindray (MR) shares
Reading Time: 2 minutes (Update Apr 2) Another news to make myself feel better, Chinese A share mutual funds declined 22% on average (read this Chinese news from Money-Courier). For comparison, Shanghai Composite index dropped about 34%, from 5261.56 to 3472.71 in the period. Note that index is not a good benchmark index because it’s skewed by some big
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
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