The club was formed in April 1997 after I (Dave) read about the group of police officers who had a share club which had performed extremely well.
Rather naively I thought anyone could do it. That
was our first mistake ! The new members had little stockmarket experience
so we struggled from
the outset. We purchased mainly penny shares hoping for the big killing which has never
happened quite the opposite in fact. It
seems that we put the kiss of death on most things we do.
We are learning now though and our latest aquisitions all seem to perform quite well.
We
had our Fourth AGM in April, unfortunately the attendance reflected the stockmarket -LOW.
It seems to have affected morale within the group
so much so that meetings are
only sparcely attended at the moment.
We have watched in amazement as some of our early purchases have gone into freefall, never to
recover. We have tried to rationalise our portfolio by selling some of our poor performers.
but as you can probably imagine, we sold some of the recent highest risers on the FTSE
Will we never learn? It has been a good time to reflect on past investments and in some cases to dive
back in to once expensive shares on which we are losing heavily. We have done this with KCOM and VOD,
effectively halving our break even point on these stocks.
shares which
actually increase in price so now we sell if we are happy with the profits at that time. Now you must
understand that the word PROFIT has never really entered into our vocabulary
because there never
were any !! We now find ourselves slightly in profit after 4 years investing. We hear stories of some
clubs being fortunate enough to have purchased shares and they have gone ballistic. Our day will come I am sure.
We have ventured into the Aim and Ofex markets in search of a winner. We awaited with great anticipation the results of this foray,
and once again we were beaten by the system. Lost pots of money!!
We also invested in 2 Unit Trusts, firstly New Japan and very recently,
North American high cap growth.
These are a little slow at the moment but long term they should do well.
We are currently researching
the Banking and Telecom sectors for our next Blue Chip purchaseWe hold a varied portfolio as you will see later, which at the
moment
is currently not in profit, now that is not nearly as bad as a couple of Clubs which
have folded due to high losses.I will introduce all the members
as and when a photograph can
be obtained. That may be difficult with our cash only members, but keep an eye out for them.