******** The Investment club thread ****

The aim of this thread is for people to share experiences of existing clubs and help people join clubs, or even start new ones in their own area.
With the personal message feature on Money am we should be able to bring people together.

Looking to join or start a club? just leave your details here.

Are you an existing club looking for new members?

We opened a new account with comdirect 2 months ago, and the members gave me 5,000 initially, and another 5,000 2 weeks ago to play with - investing for short term profit using the limit order facility (Which we did't have with Barclays stockbrokers!). I've taken almost 1,500 in gains, & still have more than 4,000 in cash waiting for one of my fav group of companies to drop to the limit order price so we can buy back in for the 2/3/4th time! I've not had so much fun in ages.

Between the increase in Market and the fun I'm having we hope to be back in overall profit very shortly. (Also the 300 in dividends in the last two months was very welcome!)And if the market dives, not to worry, got some cash ready to buy some cheap shars!

little woman

Give yourselves the added facility of being able to go short by opening a spreadbet or cfd account.

I have considered it, and we did discuss it at one meeting earlier in the year, but too many members didn't understand how it work, and one was very vocal against it as "her husband had lost nearly every thing they had 15 years ago doing the same thing!" I think he was heavily into traded options and spreadbetting with money he didn't have.

Also it takes so long to set up an account. (One of our members lives abroad, two live overseas 6 months of the year, one we have not actually seen for over two years and two others have trouble making it to a lot of meetings because of work committments! - we have 14 members, so we changed our rules so going to meetings are not compulsory as long as they keep us up to date with contact addresses and/or e-mail, but the lovely late afternoon lunch/dinner after the meeting is the incentive for those who do turn up which is usually 8 or 9!)

We have our AGM coming up and when finally managed to pass a message to our bank, barcalys that we will have a change of Chairman so needed to update their records. They informed me that our current records were out of date, (they only have the details from when we first set the account up and none of the details since, even though everything has changed 3 times since then!) so we all need to produce our 3 different types of ID (in case we become terrorists or money launders) before they can make any changes! (That includes me, although I did all this when I opened the account all those years ago and I may have become a terrorist in the meantime!) As we have do do all this anyway, we may as well move our account somewhere else as barclays at the beginning of the year gave us the option of bank charges & pennies interest or no bank charges and no interest. Abbey National look a better option to collect out subscriptions!

Had our meeting tonight and decided to buy SBRY, the yield at 6% and the deal with Shell petrol stations were the Bull points.

Also decided to invest in a pawnbroker ABM plenty of cash and stock on the balance sheet, smaller investment than SBRY, but somthing differant.

Thought I would bring this thread back - with all these novices who want to learn about the stockmarket, it could be a good way for them to find out more without losing their shirt!

Im intersted in joinig an investment club in the area where I live

Rolly, you need to either say which area you live - or update your user settings so that people know which area you live, and make it possible so they can send you e-mails about their investment club.

Our club is meeting on Sunday and I'm pleased to say I'm going to be able to report that the portfolio has gone up by over 10% since the last meeting two months ago, and thats inspite of writing off two of our holdings and removing them from the portfolio!

Thought I'd let you know a little about the Kinvest Investment Club based in Kinross, Scotland.
We are an associate club of the Kinross 50+ Club and all Kinvest members must be members of the parent Club.
We started in June 1997 with 20 members and, with resignations as recent as last April, now have 8 members. (Well anyone can lose interest when not making money!)
Let me know if you live in the Kinross area and would be interested in joining an investment club.
Our profitable shares are BHG, BRJK, EDG, IPR, MCTY, NFDS, & TSCO while DUC, MMG, & MRW which are at various stages of recovery (well great loss as far as Duc & MMG are concerned).
Earlier this year we prepared graphs comparing the share we held with the Sector and FTSE 100. The starting point was the time we bought that share.
We were pleased to find that our selection came out on top. This gave us the confidence to hold them over the Spring dips to this recovery period.

I agree with an earlier contributor that Sector selection is critical.
We have chosen on factors like Sector strength, Cash rich company, Defensive shares like food and drink, and New Managing Director with new focus.
Hope this speel triggers a few discussions.

Had a good meeting yesterday. It was a lovely day and had the meeting, and lunch in the Gazebo of one of the members.

We agreed to buy VRD straight away to put away for the long term and collect dividends and buy NICL & SCTN between now and the next meeting on a limit order at a agreed price, quite a bit lower than the current price. If the share price drops we buy, if it doesn't we have more cash at the next meeting!

Don't you just love the market!

All three of the shares we were interested in went Ex div today. VRD which we bought on Monday (as we thought it would hold after) has dropped over 4% so far, the other two which we thought would drop so decided to see if we could buy after they dropped - well NICL is down less than 0.5% and SCTN is up slightly!

Hello all

I have not popped in for a while, nice to see a few posts.
Great news is that we are now an investment club in profit.
The first time in our 27 month history.

The star of the show is Burtonwood currently +41%

We went as low as -30% just goes to show it pays to hold your nerve and not jump ship like many have.

ROLLEY What part of the world are you in?

August turned out to be a quiet month.

Just got an extention on the clubs main trading account to provide verification from the members to comdirect (we opened this account in March) or they will suspend the account. Trouble is the chair has been in Australia visiting family since the beginning of July and does not seem to be in any hurry to return to the UK! (Thank god I didn't provide all the members on the account opening details or I really would be in trouble!)

They also are putting their charges up from 7.50 a deal to 12.50 a deal.

One of the members is leaving next month as he wants to take the money to finance a round the world trip for his wife (and he is going too!) We have the cash available so it won't be a problem, but the rest of us will miss him, especially as the lunches he provided for some of the meetings were really excellent.....

Little woman

You may want to look at Harg and Land, we are paying 9.95 per deal.
They also pay interest on cash balance.

We are still showing a very small profit.

Harg and Land? tried to locate a web page, but no luck. Could you let me have more info?

www.hargreaveslansdown.co.uk

Found it!

Meeting on Sunday. DYS (thanks vasey) a purchase after the last meeting is doing very well. Expecting quite a high turnout as only one apology so far and the members who live overseas are actually in the UK at the moment!

i would like to join an investment club. Do u know any in central/south manchester. Thanks

I live in the west coast of scotland and am very interested in jioning the club.

Swansea group next meet Monday 5 Jan. (As per post No 2, this is a 'skills/info exchange' club, not a pooling-of-money club.).
Anyone within 25 miles or so interested, let me know. At Monday's meeting this week we looked at the 2004 Stockmarket Almanac, compared notes on stake-size calculation when spreadbetting, and looked at particular stocks/indices that each of us had been working with lately.