Successful Investing

Covid Cancellation Conference (5/14-16)

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SCHEDULE PRESENTERS ABOUT

… and with a Nod To Places Like St. Louis, Philadelphia and Dallas …

As the accompanying image suggests (and “delivers”) we’re in the middle of storm clouds over places like St. Louis. Stock markets have been turbulent in the wake of a pandemic and the path ahead is foggy, at best. That said, we envision a break in the clouds, future rainbows and better days ahead. The pandemic includes an outbreak of event cancellations and there’s no more succinct way to express what we think about that. “We miss all of you.”

In that spirit, we’re building Successful Investing I — a compendium of investing discussions intended to characterize the current challenges and demonstrate the discovery of opportunity. We’ve been through similar challenges in the past and the key is remembering that no matter how deep and wide the chasm shall prove to be, there’s always opportunities for long term investors

FULL SCHEDULE

Thursday — May 14 — 8:30 PM ET Panel Discussion — Always Invest Better (Butcher, Donnelly, Kavula, Lynch, McManus, Robertson)

Friday — May 15 — 2 PM ET Small Company Discovery (Kavula, Robertson)

Friday — May 15 — 4 PM ET Bear Market Lessons (McManus, Robertson)

Saturday — May 16 — 1 PM ET Selling Guidelines (Kavula, Lynch, Robertson)

Saturday — May 16 — 3 PM ET These Are A Few Of Our Favorite Screens (2 Guys & “All”)

SESSION DESCRIPTIONS

Stock Selection Panel Discussion

We’ll kickoff the event with a traditional panel, spending a few moments honoring the past and providing a fully transparent review of historical performance … and we’ll share the analysis of a favorite idea … with a lightning round chaser. REGISTER

Small Company Discovery

Finding smaller companies to add to portfolios is always a challenge. What is the role of small companies in your portfolio? What’s the difference between small-cap and small company? Join Ken Kavula and Mark Robertson as they present a progress report on their Best Small Companies for 2020. They will show how the list was put together and look at some interesting ways to identify small companies for study and possible purchase. When’s the last time you added a great small company to your portfolio? REGISTER

Bear Market Lessons

In this session, Mark and Hugh will take a look at the challenges presented during bear markets and the reliable approach inspired by some of the Legends of Investing. Trust your studies. What can be done when earnings are a mess on your visual analysis? What opportunities should be emphasized during deeper recessions and bear markets? What stocks were favored ten years ago and how have they done? REGISTER

Selling Guidelines

For the last two or three years Mark Robertson and Ken Kavula have been looking at ways to refine the selling process. Cy Lynch brings the perspective of portolio-centered decisions and its impact on necessary management decisions. Starting with the traditional selling cues, Ken, Mark and Cy have been searching for triggers which might add a percentage or two to total portfolio returns. As the data mounts, the findings are worthy of further exploration. Listen to new ideas. Respect time-honored guidelines and traditions. Can we sell better? REGISTER

These Are A Few Of Our Favorite Screens

Join Mark Robertson and Ken Kavula in this no-holds barred discussion about investing. The Two Guys are known throughout our long term investing community for this lively discussion class and they are sure to not disappoint! You’ll never know exactly what the topics will be but you can be sure to walk away with thought-provoking stock ideas and useful ideas to put to work as you build your nest egg. This session will focus on our favorite sources of ideas and we’ll be joined by a suitable compliment of damsels and knights as we explore Ivory Soap, Irish Spring and a number of stock study idea generators. REGISTER

PRESENTERS & CONTRIBUTORS

Kim Butcher is a Lifetime member of BetterInvesting and a BetterInvesting National Convention Presenter as well as a Round Table Presenter for Manifest Investing . She is currently a member of 2 investment clubs and one being “Bionic”, an online club that has members from the East to the West coast. Her love of teaching began during her career as a nurse over 30 years ago. She is also a past member of the BetterInvesting Volunteer Advisory Board (BIVAB).

Pat Donnelly is president of the Pittsburgh Chapter having worked in several positions within the Chapter and previously served on the Better Investing Volunteer Advisory Board. Pat is proudly married to Sue Donnelly and together they have two great kids. Pat and Sue have recently added a grandchild. (Welcome to the Club!) During the day, Pat is a cloud infrastructure technology consultant. Besides finding great stocks, learning from the great volunteers, he likes to learn and share about the many no-cost computer based resources available to the individual investor. Tools that are available to everyone, some of them built right into your computer. When time permits after that Pat is revisiting his interest in sailing.

Ken Kavula (kkavula1@comcast.net) has served the modern investment club movement in a wide variety of leadership volunteer positions. He is a Nicholson award winner, a retired educator and is regarded as a small company champion and respected speaker nationwide. You might have heard him teaching on the TickerTalk program for BetterInvesting. Before retirement, Ken served as Principal of Genesee HS for 21 years. He lives with his wife Natalie near their two children and five grandchildren and he also belongs to four investment clubs, including two Model clubs and a family club. Ken and Natalie are avid theater goers and travel as much as they can.

Cy Lynch (celynch@att.net) is a respected and experienced long-term investor and educator. He has served in a number of regional and national volunteer capacities and currently serves on the Better Investing Board of Directors. Among his many vocational roles include investment advisory and service as a lawyer. He recently was ordained as a Baptist Minister. He is a Lifetime member of Better Investing. Cy is a frequent contributor at MANIFEST, providing regular educational topics and a knight of the Round Table series. Cy and his wife, Barb, are enthusiastic advocates for animal rights.

Hugh McManus (hughmcmanus@gmail.com) is a pharmaceutical scientist, successful long-term investor and renowned advocate at investment education conferences. A frequent contributor to MANIFEST, Hugh is also a knight, participating in our Round Table series. Hugh is renowned for his “less traditional” stock selections at conferences and for the Round Table but we know that he also maintains a steadfast core of vetted, excellent companies — accumulated at great prices over a few decades, too. Hugh is known for his extensive travels and has only recently spent a record number of days at home with his Irish Wolfhounds.

Mark Robertson (markr@manifestinvesting.com) is founder and Managing Partner of Manifest Investing, served as senior contributing editor for Better Investing and has worked with successful investment clubs and individual investors since 1993. He has appeared on National Public Radio, CNBC and ABC to discuss long-term investing. He has also worked with Smart Money, Barron’s, Money magazine and the Motley Fool and been covered by the Chicago Tribune, Wall Street Journal and MarketWatch as well as a number of local publications.

Sponsors

The Mid-Michigan Chapter of Better Investing is an outstanding example of community investing. Known as a “chapter” that operates on behalf of the National Association of Investors, the goal is to share the potential of long-term investing with as many individuals as possible. A network of investment clubs and individual investors has been admirably served by a talented team of educators and counselors for decades. The excellence runs deep — centered on the time-honored lessons of the modern investment club movement for the past 80 years. The chapter runs a steady series of educational programs and supports the development of regional and nationwide opportunities for sharing. We’re better together.

Manifest Investing is a web-based investing system including research and features/tools for stock and fund screening as well as resources for portfolio design and management. The resources are completely based on our interpretation of the lessons learned, methodologies, techniques and disciplines promulgated by the modern investment club movement. The intent is to serve do-it-yourself investors, small groups of portfolio managers known as investment clubs and to support the efforts of those who want to work in a more informed manner with their professional investing advisors. The community and content stream generates a continuous flow of actionable ideas. We seek and deliver “elegant simplicity” by focusing on a small number of factors and characteristics that really matter. Features and regular webcasts (e.g. Investing Round Table) feature demonstrations of analysis and methods. Our focus is on demystifying investing — particularly when it comes to the design and management of a portfolio — enabling anyone to experience successful investing with their personal investing or retirement plans. We endorse and encourage investment clubs as vehicles for support and group learning.

If you’d like a FREE test drive of http://www.manifestinvesting.com to explore and experience the origins of community-driven actionable ideas, send your request to markr@manifestinvesting.com  The annual subscription is $40/year — a special offer that will expire at the end of the month.  The annual subscription will be $59 after that.

 

Stocks, NOT Markets, For Success

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Some words from Better Investing editor Don Danko and his editorial advisory team back in October 1991 …

It’s Stocks, Not Markets, That Bring Investment Success

When investors gather in Chicago later this month for NAIC’s annual Congress, it will be the 41st consecutive year that members will have come together to learn more about common stock investing.

Forty-one years. That’s quite a stretch of time. For many in the NAIC family, the members who have attended these meetings over the years represent at least two generations, in some cases even more. And those four decades of time also have involved all types of economic activity and all kinds of stock markets.

Some have been quite memorable. Like 1987 in Detroit. The Congress took place Oct. 14 -17 that year, literally on the heels of the market’s biggest plunge ever. In fact, the dive started on Friday, Oct. 16, with a collapse of more than 100 points in the Dow Jones Industrial Average while investors were attending seminars and touring the corporate exhibit area. That day they experienced the largest one-day drop in market history, a record that was not to stand very long. On Oct. 19, Black Monday, the market fell another 508 points.

Two years later, on Oct. 13, 1989 (yes, it was a Friday the 13th), the market took a huge plunge again while NAIC investors were holding their annual meeting in Minneapolis. The fall was not as severe as in 1987, but it was large enough (190 points, with most of it in the final hour of trading) to bring on the usual flurry of media reports and interviews suggesting that the sky may be falling.

Yet the surprising thing to many observers, in truth even a bit unbelievable to some, was the fact that Congress-goers didn’t seem to be too concerned about losing money or deciding when and what to sell. Yes, they had a keen interest in following what was happening in the market. And, yes, what was happening did have an effect on the value of their holdings. But the focus of most every investor we met with at both Congresses was on what and when to buy instead of what and when to sell.

What Wall Street was reporting as gloom and doom, our members were viewing as an opportunity to bargain shop.

We don’t intend to make light of bear markets. They are real and they hurt people. Some are hurt because they are forced to sell shares at low prices to meet financial needs. Others because the fear of even greater loss is more than they can handle. They didn’t expect this type of loss could happen.

Nevertheless, bear markets, even the fear of bear markets, keep investors from enjoying the benefits a program of regular investing can bring. Bear markets drive people away from equity investing. People get no enjoyment in watching the prices of stocks that they have been patiently buying, sometimes for years, fall below the price they paid. That’s not their idea of something to celebrate.

Over the past four decades, if there has been one single conclusion that we have come to, based on the experiences of thousands of Americans throughout the nation, it’s that it is important to stay in the market and continue a program of regular investing in order to build wealth. That simply is the best way that wealth is created.

To do that requires three key ingredients: 1) A focus on the long term. (Don’t be derailed by pressure to think and act short term.) 2) A discipline to apply in building and managing a portfolio. 3) Patience to persevere. (This is where clubs and other individuals who share similar goals can provide invaluable support.) It’s hard to say which ingredient is the toughest. They are all important and success depends on being able to blend all three into your own personal program of investing.

There are times when bears frolic in financial markets, and other times when the dancing is done by the bulls. But in order for most investors to build their wealth and fund their lifelong dreams, they need to dance to a different drummer.

We believe very strongly that the words to the tune that drummer is playing go like this: There is little in today’s news that has a bearing on the wealth an individual can accumulate over his or her lifetime. Money can be made in all types of markets, if the focus is long term. It’s stocks, not markets, that bring investment success.