Diane Windingland called the meeting of the Crow River Investment Club to order at 6:30 pm on October 14, 2008. Bob, a friend of Gary’s, attended as a guest.
Diane Windingland, Lynn Ostrem, Carole Ripplinger, Sheryl Sostarich, Kim Windingland, Dan Vitez and Gary Quernemoen were present with payment. Marion Marshall and Beth Silverwater were absent with notice and payment.
We received a letter of resignation dated October 1, 2008 from Mike Trisler.
After a motion was made and seconded, we voted to pay Ron Thorson in cash for his buyout from the club.
The minutes of the September 9, 2008 meeting were approved as posted.
Carole made a dues deposit totaling $350, leaving an ending bank balance of $401.80.
We received dividend income of $34.94, leaving an ending brokerage account balance of 118.19.
New Business—None
New Member Requirements
After a motion was made and seconded, we voted to make it mandatory that all Crow River Investment Club members buy an ongoing membership in StockCentral. We have adopted StockCentral as our official software database.
Lynn Ostrem is designing a New Member Mentoring program, complete with training sessions and video tutorials. Each club member will be responsible for a segment of the training of a prospective member. All members must be in agreement that a prospective member is right for the club before a prospective will be admitted into the club.
The winter social dinner will be held at the Rock Woods Restaurant in Otsego on Saturday, November 1, 2008 beginning at 6:00 pm. Spouses and friends are welcome to attend. Please confirm your attendance to Diane Windingland.
We agreed not to take a position in Cameco being that it is a cyclical stock, commodity prices are falling and there is considerable market risk to owning Cameco.
Energen by Carole. Energen is a distributor of natural gas in central and northern Alabama. Although the company operates in the historically stable utility sector, the company is not immune to volatility in commodity prices or market risk. We would need to study the regulatory climate in Alabama as well as compare the quality of Energen with its peers. As a club, we chose judgments on the SSG as follows: 11.8% sales growth, 7.2% EPS growth, high P/E of 15, low P/E of 9, and set $19 as the low price.
Dan Vitez succeeds Ron Thorson as the Portfolio Manager. Lynn Ostrem volunteered to be co-Portfolio Manager, assisting with the preparation of the Challenge List and Watch List.
Dan prepared two challenge lists of ten stocks: one list filtered from the StockCentral (Roster of Quality) and the other list filtered from the Manifest database. Dan chose Energen as the new stock to present because of its high quality rating and because the utilities sector is not represented in our portfolio.
Quarterly Stock Reports
Quarterly stock reports for BestBuy (Carole) and FactSet Research (Kim) were posted to the message board.
After reviewing the stocks in our portfolio, we voted to sell Walgreen in order to pay Mike Trisler for his buyout from the club. Carole will enter a stop loss order to limit the risk of more price erosion in Walgreen.
Lynn gave an overview of the new features of Toolkit 6 including automatic updates, enhanced graphics, improved computational features and added links. Members are advised to download the Demo version and strongly urged to buy the software while favorable promotional pricing is being offered. Contact Lynn for information on purchasing the software.
Assignments for the November meeting:
1. Lynn Ostrem will give a new stock presentation.
2. Quarterly stock reports are due for Coach (Kim), General Electric & Infosys Technologies (Sheryl), National Oilwell Varco (Gary), Portfolio Recovery Associates (Dan), Stryker (Marion), and Wells Fargo (Beth). Quarterly stock reports are to be posted to the message board no later than 2 days before the November meeting.
3. Carole will enter a stop loss order to sell Walgreen.
4. All members are to review the video presentation There Is a Time to Buy by Mary Ann Davis and participate in an open discussion of the video.
5. Stock watchers are to bring the latest Value Line, Morningstar, and Standard & Poor’s reports for the stocks they are watching. Also, they should review the judgments for their stocks and be prepared to make any recommendations for altering those judgments. Note: This is a carryover assignment from October.
The meeting was adjourned at 8:45 pm.
Sheryl A Sostarich, Secretary
The next meeting will be at Lynn’s in St. Michael on Tuesday, November 11, 2008.