Dollars and Sense Investment Club


   

Background

The Dollars and Sense Investment Club is a partnership dedicated to learning about investing through study and investing.  We started creating the club in late 2000 and formally started the partnership in early 2001.  We currently have over $60,000 invested.  We intend to make money with our investing, so it is not just an academic exercise, although learning is a big part of what we do. 

We subscribe to the Edward Jones philosophy of buying stocks for the long haul or "buy and hold".  We do not do any "day trading".  However, we do review our portfolio at least once per year with a view at improving our portfolio return so we do not hold forever, but only so long as a company continues to show good fundamentals and a reasonable return on investment.  Partners can do any kind of investing they want to do on their own, outside of the partnership, and they can use whatever information they learn from our partnership investigations for their own investing betterment.

We meet for one meeting a month on the first Tuesday from 6:30 PM to 8 PM at Yaggy-Colby on 3rd Ave SE.  We currently have 10 partners and would love to have a few more partners, so you are welcome to come and find out about us.  Prospective members need to attend 3 meetings and start to participate in discussions before they are eligible to join.  Joining entails reading and signing our partnership agreement and starting to make a regular $50 per month investment to the club treasury.  All of the monthly investment (except for some unavoidable partnership expenses) is invested in stock. 

We expect members to learn about investing and to participate in investigating new and current companies for future purchases and sales.    

Contact president Don Eisenmenger or treasurer Bill Brooks for more information.

Partnership Documents

The partnership is run following the articles of association which can be read here.

More of the club's philosophy and methods are discussed in the Club Prospectus here.

A prospective new partner needs to read and follow the new member application which is here.

A prospective new partner to become a partner must sign the following new partner agreement which is here.

All members must read and understand the financial statements used by the partnership and this is covered here.

If you can't make a regular meeting but want to be able to cast your vote anyway you can use a Dollars and Sense proxy statement which is here.  Notice the proxy statement is a Word document, so you can edit the page, then save it to your desktop (right mouse click then pick "SAVE") for printing or to attach to an email to send to the person you want to represent you at the next meeting.

When you are reviewing a company to make a presentation, fill out the stock evaluation form for that company and it's competitors.  That form is here.  Notice that you can copy and paste the 10 year chart from MSN Money by right clicking on the chart there, select "COPY", then "PASTE" it onto the spreadsheet.  Once it is pasted you can adjust its size by pulling on the edges of the chart image.  The spreadsheet is formatted to automatically print the chart along with all of the text material.  

Educational Web Links

Check here for a good article on companies issuing stock options: pros and cons.

For information about investing from long time investing coach Armin Fields, check out the following RSS feed: http://arminfields.wordpress.com/feed

Check here for information from Ellis Traub, long time investing coach.

 

Jim Thomas' Investment Club Accounting Concepts document.

And here for information, visual and otherwise, from another investing coach, Bakul Lalla.

An interesting investment club with a lot of educational information--Crow River Investment Club

Bob Adams is a long time investor and coach and he has numerous helpful spreadsheets for investment use and they are available here.   Among other things, he has a Portfolio Tracker tool designed to provide when to sell information, and available on his website.  It extracts data from the Toolkit database and displays it for each company in a portfolio--or which ever company you want to follow.

Andy Pagorek is a former VP of Education and an investing evangelist and his informative investing website is here.

Here are a couple of resources about using PERT (Portfolio Evaluation and Review Technique):

 http://biwiki.editme.com/ then on the left under Portfolio Mgmt Tools click on PERT,

and the Toolkit Manual is another source for PERT information.

And here for second opinions on 5 years worth of data on 2,800 stocks.  Note that this site has a fee.

Here is a new stock screener that may be of use to you for the club and for your own investing.  Check it out! 

 

Here are some reference books recommended by various investment club members:

  • "One Up on Wall Street" by Peter Lynch

  • "The Beardstown Ladies' Common-Sense Investment Guide", a fascinating read although they did have one major error in their claims about how well their stocks performed.

  • "The Richest Man In Babylon" by George S Clayson

  • "The Stock Selection Handbook" from Better Investing

  • "Using Portfolio Management Wisdom" from Better Investing

  • "Take Stock" by Ellis Traub

  • "Learn to Earn" by Peter Lynch

  • "Financial Shenanigans" by Schilit

  • "Financial Fine Print" by Leder

  • "The Great Game" by John Gordan Steele, a very readable history of Wall Street

  • "Stocks for the Long Run" by Siegel

  • "The Smart Investors Survival Guide" by Charles Colson

  • "The 60 Second Investor" by Charles Colson

We recommend that all partners become members of BetterInvesting.  This will cost you $79 per year and will provide you monthly copies of Bettering Investing magazine as well as access to a lot of excellent information in the Better Investing website.  They now provide online stock evaluation tools as well as a wide variety of software tools that you can buy and install on your own PCs.  A couple of the online tools include:

  • The Online Stock Comparison Guide (SCG) which is one of the most feature-rich, graphical comparison guides out there, and you’ll learn how easy (and beneficial) it is to use.

  • The Online Stock Selection Guide (SSG), including the preferred procedure functionality, member sentiment page, low price selection options.

To help you become a better, more informed investor, they regularly schedule webinars to be enjoyed from the comfort of your own home.  Some of these are free and some of them require a fee.  Here is a link to a great 1+ hour webinar on the online Stock Selection Guide.  You will need to register to hear it and see it, but it will not cost you anything.  Note that there is a free copy of the tool available to try out, but you can't print from it, nor can you apply to more than a relatively small group of companies.  Once you become a member, then you will have access to the fully functional tool.   
 

Better Investing's Wiki on all things investing.

 

Another investing Wiki.

 

There are a lot of great educational topics in these wiki's such as this on bond investing.

 

Here is a link discussing municipal bonds.  Note that they also sell municipal bonds....

 

Investopedia-A Forbes Digital Company.  Here is one of the better articles from that company.

 

We use the following two sites for most of company investigations, and particularly for stock history and stock contest presentations:

Notice that we also use the company's own website in our investigations.

  

Here are several more financial information websites:

  • For StockCentral, click here

  • For FactSet, click here

  • For Thompson, click here

  • For Zacks, click here

  • For Morningstar, click here

  • For Forbes, click here

Here’s some info on BetterInvesting & Social Networking.

 

Join the BetterInvesting Community on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

 

Three of the largest social media sites have BetterInvesting groups that we invite you to join. These sites are great ways to network with other members and communicate with friends you’ve made through the association. You’ll need to become a member at the sites to join the groups. 

 

At Facebook, the BetterInvesting group page is: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=61885203286

 

At Twitter, you can follow us at:  http://twitter.com/BetterInvesting

 

At LinkedIn, the “Better Investing — NAIC” group is at:  http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1072847

 

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Last site update: Wednesday, January 04, 2012 02:00 PM.

Copyright © 2004-2011 William Brooks. All rights reserved.
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