In your experience, what is a good size for an investment club?
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In your experience, what is a good size for an investment club? We sometimes hear from clubs that say they are considering disbanding because a couple of members are leaving and they'll now "only" have 8-10 active members. What club size works for you? It would be great to get some different perspectives we could pass along to clubs that are worried about not having enough members. -- Laurie Frederiksen Invest with your friends! www.bivio.com Become our Facebook friend! www.facebook.com/bivio Follow us on twitter! www.twitter.com/bivio only 4 and it is working On Fri, Jan 13, 2012 at 2:50 PM, Laurie Frederiksen <laurie@bivio.biz> wrote: We sometimes hear from clubs that say they are considering disbanding because a couple of members are leaving and they'll now "only" have 8-10 active members. Four that are all engaged and pulling their weight is infinitely better than a club with 10 or more and only 1 or two that do all the work. Energy is much more important than numbers. On Jan 13, 2012, at 2:04 PM, Herb Lemcool wrote: only 4 and it is working I would kill to have 8-10 active members if you mean active as in actively participating in club duties. We started with 7 members and slowly added members to the current 12 plue 3 custodial members. Only a few are active members. I'm interested in the specific reasons for disbanding. Is it due to a smaller amount of monthly contributions? Personally, my goal for my club is to get enough members to have about $1,000 to invest in monthly. Currently we have about $700. Don't care about the number of members itself.
John
From: Laurie Frederiksen <laurie@bivio.biz> To: The Club Cafe <club_cafe@bivio.com> Sent: Fri, January 13, 2012 11:50:56 AM Subject: [club_cafe] In your experience, what is a good size for an investment club? We sometimes hear from clubs that say they are considering disbanding because a couple of members are leaving and they'll now "only" have 8-10 active members. What club size works for you? It would be great to get some different perspectives we could pass along to clubs that are worried about not having enough members. -- Laurie Frederiksen Invest with your friends! www.bivio.com Become our Facebook friend! www.facebook.com/bivio Follow us on twitter! www.twitter.com/bivio Our club has been around for 18 years. We decided to cap our membership at 20 members and have stayed around this level since inception. When we do have a withdrawal, there is typically a waiting list that we go to fill the gap. Every couple of years we ask about the target and typically get an answer of “about 20” as the target. Jimmy James P. Dickerson From: club_cafe@bivio.com [mailto:club_cafe@bivio.com] On Behalf Of John Rice I would kill to have 8-10 active members if you mean active as in actively participating in club duties. We started with 7 members and slowly added members to the current 12 plue 3 custodial members. Only a few are active members. I'm interested in the specific reasons for disbanding. Is it due to a smaller amount of monthly contributions? Personally, my goal for my club is to get enough members to have about $1,000 to invest in monthly. Currently we have about $700. Don't care about the number of members itself.
John From: Laurie Frederiksen <laurie@bivio.biz> AMEN to Paul Madison's comment. I've said it for years. I'd rather have a club with 4-5 active members than a club of 20 where only 4-5 are doing all the work. In our heyday, the Crow River club had 15 members. As a model club, we made sure that every meeting was "produced" to maximize everyone's experience. It was a lot of work! Somehow, the mix of people turned sour, and we had 3 people doing the majority of the work. We staged a coo, blew everyone else out, raised our dues from $30 to $50 per month, dumped the formal meeting agenda and now we have 5 very happy and productive members.
And to give you an idea about the contributions, just last month we took in $250 in dues...and $411 in revenue from selling 1 covered call and 2 cash-secured puts. With conservative options, we can keep our money working for us every month without having to add more people. Everyone is seasoned, to one degree or another, and we spend our entire meeting time (which we cut from 2 hours to 1-1/2) discussing stocks and managing our portfolio. We decided we would consider bringing on one more person if they met our criteria. Otherwise, we plan to stay small.
I've done it both ways now, and I definitely find a smaller club to be more intimate, more relaxed, and more fun. Lynn Ostrem
On Fri, Jan 13, 2012 at 2:30 PM, Paul Madison <madispa@gmail.com> wrote:
-- Lynn Ostrem Resource Management Group, Inc. 4439 McAllister Av NE St.Michael, MN 55376 Office: 763/497-5153 Fax: 763/497-5838 Cell: 612/750-4943 garbagecop@gmail.com
The 711 Investment Club has been in business for more than 55
years - never missing a monthly meeting as far as I can determine! Amazing. I
have only been a member since 2005 and Treasurer since 2008.
We currently have 22 members, having been at about 20 members
for many years. The number of members is primarily based on how many folks that
we think that we can comfortably accommodate in our monthly, Saturday morning
breakfast meeting!!
The Investment Committee ( about six in number) does much
of the heavy lifting, but we get reasonable participation from all of the
members and the monthly hosting is rotated from house to house. The club's
objectives are to educate about investment and to enjoy and extend the
professional association that bound us together during our many years of service
as federal employess.
We are not likely to expand the membership in the future
and we may well find that our membership will decline slowly as our life-long
members simply are unable to continue to participate due to age and replacement
members are beyond our reach. Such is life.
I know that our club is not the "norm", but this formula works
for us.
Best regards,
Leo Cardillo From: club_cafe@bivio.com [mailto:club_cafe@bivio.com] On Behalf Of Laurie Frederiksen Sent: Friday, January 13, 2012 2:51 PM To: The Club Cafe Subject: [club_cafe] In your experience, what is a good size for an investment club? What club size works for you?�� It would be great to get some different perspectives we could pass along to clubs that are worried about not having enough members. -- Laurie Frederiksen Invest with your friends! www.bivio.com Become our Facebook friend! �www.facebook.com/bivio Follow us on twitter!� www.twitter.com/bivio Our club is made up of three couples, for a total of 6 members. It is a perfect size for us, we have no desire to grow. IN our by laws, we state that a quorum requires one person from each couple, so occasionally we have a 3 person meeting. We are primarily new investors and find that this small size makes learning about stocks really ideal. Ellen Shershow Pena Photography 415.690.0278 On Jan 13, 2012, at 12:04 PM, Herb Lemcool wrote: only 4 and it is working Laurie, Our Merrill Ranch Investment Club, Florence, AZ., currently is made up of 12 members. Our goal is at least 20 and it is legal to have more than 20 that will be great. We meet one time per month but we recently formed an Investment Committee that is charged to prepare a summary Stock Selection Guide on current stocks in our portfolio We use the services of Better Investing to prepare the SSG. The Committee meets the week before the regularly scheduled meeting. We also do an SSG on any stock recommendations from a member. At the regularly scheduled meeting a discussion is held on the SSG results and the recommendations of the Committee to Buy, Hold, or Sell. R.M. Shoppell - Merrill Ranch Club |
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