In the last couple of weeks, there has been considerable interest expressed on the I-Club in finding and joining on-line investment clubs. It's bringing some lurkers out in the open.
The thought occurred to me that StockCentral should be the gathering place for this kind of activity. Here are my thoughts about it:
This is, indeed, a time when both public sentiment is for virtual meetings, personal service, and asynchronous communication and when technology begins to support this kind of activity. The future of serious investment clubs is not going to be in the kind where people must find the common time to meet and congregate at a common place. Many folks would now rather sit at home, in front of their computers, and participate in chat rooms or asynchronous message boards.
StockCentral should have a separate forum for On-Line clubs. People should be encouraged to form and operate clubs at StockCentral where, for a very small, additional micro-fee, monthly or annually, they can come together and invest together. And, when a club forms in this venue, the benefits include such things as free use of On-line Club Accounting for their club and a counsellor assigned to assist it in getting started, adopting protocols that anticipate and avoid problems, and solving problems when they do arise. Of course,
The notion of being able to zip a company into On-Line Take $tock and produce a Summary for the club to discuss is exciting. More than that, to be able to share with the other club members such things as real-time stock studies, research on the Web, and PowerPoint presentations that, in the past, clubs could not do even when they met at the same place and had a computer at their disposal, has even greater potential.
StockCentral should/would have a "model club" which could serve as a guide for the others and could/would operate publicly, even staging common problems for which it demonstrates solutions.
On that forum, the mechanism for signing up in the club would provide for a set of by-laws that the potential member would read and click to accept. (The set of by-laws would be available for any new club to accept and/or revise to their satisfaction once the club is up and running.) And, clubs would be able to advertise for members right in that forum, as would members looking for a club.
Each club would have a volunteer counsellor assigned to it to answer questions and help with the protocols at the meetings. The clubs would initially be just educational clubs which would have no money invested as a club. The members would/could invest individually. They would have a choice of being either password-protected, private clubs or public clubs, open for anyone to observe.
One real benefit of this process would be to have an annual contest with prizes for the clubs whose portfolios' quality is the best (judged not by price performance but by the aggregate metrics displayed on the Overview page of the Toolkit. Clubs could choose to participate in this or not. )
When the proof of concept indicates that this is well received and successful, it will be time to move on to clubs that do invest their own money. For this purpose, ICLUBcentral would/could, for a slightly larger fee, arrange with a broker like FolioFN (probably the best bet today) to provide, in partnership with StockCentral, contracts for the club members. Much like a self-directed mutual fund, this would provide for a fixed payment each month to go to directly from each member to the brokerage. The club treasurer would be able to post the transactions in everyone's presence at the time the decision was made. And, between the broker's display and Toolkit's portfolio management facility, they would be able to see the immediate effect of the transaction on the portfolio in real time.
I have only scratched the surface of the possibilities here. The potential is amazing! While there are many who, having dealt with a non-profit organization for a long time, might bridle at the notion of paying fees to a for-profit entity, it is those fees that will both justify and enable StockCentral to keep up with technology and continuously improve the club experience. As time goes on, clubs will be able to graduate from on-screen message boards and chats to VOIP conferences where the club members can talk to each other as if they were in the same room. It won't be long before that will be accompanied by the ability to see each other as well as hear each other speak. Along with this technology will come the ability to provide educational sessions for clubs on-line with both recorded and video-taped presentations by well-known gurus, and eventually live presentations that will be interactive; i.e., people can ask questions and get responses in real time, just as if they were gathered in an auditorium...only much better because it's personal and right there in everyone's own home.
The possibilities are endless, I believe. The future of investors' clubs lies in this vision, I'm sure. And we at StockCentral should be on the cutting edge, leading the way!