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MAKING
MONEY WITH ONLINE INVESTMENT CLUBS
There
are thousands of online investment services, some published by brokerage
firms, some published by news organizations like CNBC and Bloomberg.
Generally I ignore any advice promoted by news organizations or
brokerage houses. They
usually have alternative motives and I doubt really care if you make money
or not.
Then
there are bulletin boards on almost any stock you are interested on and
you can find some interesting facts about a company, however you will also
meet a lot of trouble makers sharing unsupported business advice, and even
bad language or arguments between different readers.
These bulletin boards, or message boards, are run by Yahoo
Finance, The Motley Fool. and a number of other sources.
The amount of garbage on these boards drove a group of seasoned investors
to migrate to ValueForum.com
ValueForum
is a private investment club where members pay about $200 a year to belong
and this has a big effect upon who the members are.
Generally speaking, the members are older professional people with
backgrounds in many different industries and they all share their
knowledge and due diligence. You
are strongly criticized for promoting a stock you own if your motivation
is to increase awareness of the stock driving up price.
Most members would block your future posts, and your postings would
not be seen by those members that are personally blocking you.
If you were to publish something that a number of members thought
was off topic, or too political, they would give you an OT (off topic)
rating and your post would be moved to an area they call the coffee shop
that is designed for more freedom of posting.
Value
forum has a way where you can evaluate a stock and give it a
buy/sell/short rating and you can get leads from that.
But one of the best ideas is quarterly they have a stock picking
contest that pays a couple hundred dollars to the winner.
Using this group, you can see which people are doing well and what
stocks they have in their contest portfolio.
One member creates a spread sheet of all these stocks and shares it
with the group. It a great
source for finding stock choices.
Value
Forum has a group of gold bugs, a group of Divi Lovers, many day traders,
put and call groups and in the future there will be other groups that will
become popular as the market changes.
These are not formal groups, but you get to learn what different
individuals like for investments. Currently
I am over loaded with high dividend stocks and I average about $15 percent
dividend yield with some paying as much as 20%.
Another
good thing is once a year ValueForum hosts an InvestFest where about 200
members get together for a weekend and listen to new ideas from many
speakers in different industries. In many cases the most interesting speakers are from our own
group. There is an InvestFest
scheduled for March 31 thru April 3 2011 in Washington DC. The year before it was held in Las Vegas.
They tend to switch coasts every year.
Currently there are 1362 members and they come from app parts of
the world. Some from Taiwan,
Briton, Canada, Mexico, Brazil and probably others I don’t know about.
The value comes from sharing knowledge from each other and growing
as a group. What ever your tastes, you will probably find it on
ValueForum.
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