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ETraub  
#1 Posted : Friday, September 14, 2007 7:33:15 AM(UTC)
ETraub

Rank: Advanced Member

Posts: 82

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!

Ellis Traub

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wyomingkid100  
#2 Posted : Friday, September 14, 2007 4:53:09 PM(UTC)
wyomingkid100

Rank: Advanced Member

Posts: 29

What an exciting vision! I have been trying to come up with something similar for our Model Club. We've seen attendance decrease beccause of the very reasons you mention, drive time, parking fees, winter weather, etc., etc., etc. (the venue we have had for the past several years just raised rates to $75/session) I had envisioned something similar but hadn't thought of SC as the platform for this. Ellis this is brilliant! Thanks so much.
Karen OBoyle
Karen OBoyle
krgallivan  
#3 Posted : Saturday, September 15, 2007 11:39:56 AM(UTC)
krgallivan

Rank: Advanced Member

Posts: 20

Ellis,

I mentioned your suggestion (which I think is a good one) over on the Compuserve Forum and have had some questions about the details.  May I post a copy over there, or would you care to?  You can contact me privately, if you wish, krgallivan - hotmail.com. 

And, while I have your "ear," thank you for continuing to be involved with investor education.
Kathleen
mstigall  
#4 Posted : Sunday, September 16, 2007 10:28:38 AM(UTC)
mstigall

Rank: Advanced Member

Posts: 32

Ellis - excellents points!
Stretch a bit, and you can consider the stock club as a virtual team. There are several products to support virtual teams and collaboration. Take a peek at "Managing Virtual Teams - Getting the most from Wikis, Blogs and other collaborative tools" (ISBN - 1-59822-028-4) to generate a few creative juices.
So I see two paths.
1) create an environment which supports collaborative work (wikis and blogs). Investing glossaries and tutorials could be "grown" like Wikipedia style collaborative efforts. Club meetings could be held virtually, and online meeting tools like WebEx, VOIP could support the effort.
2) change the club investing tools to support online, collaborative work. So TakeStock for clubs could start with the TSSW as the base for a blog. People's comments would be revisions/updates/comments against the blog. Finally, votes for purchase could be tallied for the club.

Remember Jerry from Minnesota (Youth Investing)? Think of the teaching potential of the two paths combined to middle-school, high-school and college groups. We might actually get some interest at the ground-level investing!
Michael Stigall
robert  
#5 Posted : Tuesday, September 18, 2007 6:33:44 AM(UTC)
robert

Rank: Advanced Member

Posts: 97

Ellis, I'm sorry I didn't see your post earlier . . .we need to get better making sure that StockCentral automatically emails posts so that the StockCentral community is aware of them. I didn't get it because I had not "checked" the option to receive postings in this forum by email yet. Hopefully this will become more automatic.

Your idea is a fabulous one, one that cleverly combines a grand new vision for investing education with methods that are "tried and true" / proven. I think StockCentral has already taken a step in that direction by giving free tax printers to any club with five or more StockCentral members. This is a friendly economic incentive to join to StockCentral community, and I predict that the general trend toward adding more and more benefits to StockCentral will continue. This will go for investing education also, which was the aspect of your posting, Ellis, that I found particularly intriguing, i.e. how to best interweave the technology with the education.

Let's keep these great ideas developing!

Robert
robert  
#6 Posted : Tuesday, September 18, 2007 10:35:35 AM(UTC)
robert

Rank: Advanced Member

Posts: 97

Oh, and by the way Ellis, Happy Birthday!
DannyM  
#7 Posted : Tuesday, September 18, 2007 5:06:41 PM(UTC)
DannyM

Rank: Advanced Member

Posts: 262

I think it would be a great idea to post your idea to i-club or at least a link to your post below. I saw more activity over the past two weeks on the list than I have in months. I also hope SC pursues this idea. Maybe throw out this idea on the newsletter
jncraig  
#8 Posted : Wednesday, September 19, 2007 7:53:12 PM(UTC)
jncraig

Rank: Advanced Member

Posts: 561

Danny,


Please feel free to summarize this discussion on i-club-list.  Messages that I post there fall into a black hole ... by their design!
Joe
daf323  
#9 Posted : Thursday, September 20, 2007 11:10:00 AM(UTC)
daf323

Rank: Advanced Member

Posts: 126

Ellis and the rest of the enthusiastic gang,

Thank you for sharing your thoughts on the future of online investment clubs. I agree the possibilities are endless and look forward to working with all of you to help determine how to best leverage the available technologies (skype, chat, virtual mtgs etc) as we move forward with the development of, and possible merging of, stockcentral and our online investment club accounting tools at myiclub.com. We are currently focused on in-progress updates to stockcentral, but i will try to address some of your points and ideas specifically and in more detail asap. I look forward to participating in the hashing out of the ideas presented and discussion of new ideas on this board and privately, and encourage the discussion amongst our community to continue. Eventually, once we know what we desire more specifically in regard to functionality and setup an initial UI, the best way to proceed, imo (open to change), would be to set up a model club, or test group composed of interested parties and go from there. Thanks again to all of you for your thoughts and enthusiam in regard to helping us envision and shape the future of club accounting and stockcentral, and how we can use the technological innovations available today to benefit community-based investment education and participation.

Dave
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