Welcome to the Southwestern College Investment Club!Each week, we invite someone from the financial and investment services industry to come and discuss their segment of the industry and their position. We also ask them to relate their experiences and how they got their start in the industry. Alternatively, we choose and discuss an investment topic from one of our professors.Everyone is welcome to attend our meetings onlines. Membership is limited to current Southwestern College students.
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Investment Chat Group based on BUS-123, Introduction to Investments
SWC Investment Club, Spring 2022 SWC Investment Club, Fall 2021 SWC Investment Club, Spring 2021 |
Spring 2023 Meetings | |
| 2 Feb 2023: | Our first meeting of the Spring 2023 semester was a mixed bag. We need at least 10 enrolled students and we only had 2 come. We also had visitors, one from New York and another from Charlotte, North Carolina. Therefore, we decided to start right in on our Introduction to Investments for the Investment Club. (We usually do this the second meeting.) Everyone can review the recorded session. Zoom Recording - Presentation: Overview of Investment Universe Remember we need at least 10 members along with a President, Vice-President, Secretary, Treasurer, and the ICC Representative to make a club. If we don't get 10 members and a slate of officers, we will just be an unofficial group. |
| 9 Feb 2023: | Well, we only had a few enrolled students and a few non-students. If we don't get 10 students and the officers, we won't be an official club. Tell your friends about us! We will see how many attend next week. If the attendance stay lows, we might decide to go all online. Zoom Recording - Presentation: Introduction to Mutual Funds We created our portfolio of 10 stocks. Chect it out below! We also then did a quick overview of mutual funds, investments for the masses. |
| 16 Feb 2023: | It appears that we will be an unofficial club this semester. No matter. Nothing really changes except we won't get money for pizza. Oh, well. If we can rustle up 10 enrolled students next week and cajole some to be officers, we still might get some pizza at the end of the semester. Tell your friends! Zoom Recording - Presentation: Introduction to Stocks Today we reviewed our portfolio. Not bad for just a few weeks. Up 2%! We then had a quick introduction to stocks. Exciting stocks! Sexy stocks! Risky stocks! |
| 23 Feb 2023: | Well, it's official. Our Club will be an Unoffical Club for Spring 2023. No biggie. It just means no pizza at the end of the semester. We will meet online only going forward and I promise we will have someone from the industry next week. We meet on Zoom at wonderprofessor.com/zoom. Our portfolio is looking kinda' weak because Moderna has dropped precipitously. (Check the portfolio's progress below.) Zoom Recording - Presentation: Discounted Cash Flow Model and The Value Line We introduced the Discounted Cash Flow Model using dividends and data from The Value Line. The two spreadsheets that we used are also in the chapter 4 section of BUS-123, Introduction to Investments. Here they are: Pretzels Unlimited Johnson and Johnson using data from The Value Line (Note: If you are unfamiliar with how to use Google Docs, check out this Chapter 1 Study Guide presentation.) (Psst. Here is the secret link to the full access of The Value Line. Shhh. Don't tell anyone, okay?) |
| 2 Mar 2023: | We reviewed our Spring 2023 portfolio. We are actually holding up pretty darned well considering the turmoil. Zoom Recording We continued our discussion of valuation models and The Value Line. Luis showed us his Discounted Cash Flow Model calculations for Colgate. The model was suggesting that we could get 8% or 9% from Colgate but not much more than that. We then went on to look at several other companies including Visa and Mastercard, Green Brick Partners (a builder based in Texas), and a very speculative company called Harbor Diversified. We saw how very large companies like Colgate, Visa, and Mastercard are much safer than smaller companies such a Green Brick Partners and Harbor Diversified. But we also noted that the smaller companies offer us a much larger potential capital gain ... or capital loss. "Do you want to eat well or do you want to sleep well?" |
| 9 Mar 2023: | This week we were very blessed to have Don Nuding from The Value Line give us a presentation. Zoom Recording Don is a Librarian with The Value Line. He showcased the new AWESOME Value Line website. It's a Sip from the Financial Firehose! Thanks to the efforts of Professor Maria Martinez-Sanabria, we now have online access to The Value Line. We will be using it in the BUS-123, Introduction to Investments, class starting next week. We have already used it extensively in our Investment Club. (Check out the previous two sessions, February 23rd and March 2nd above.) Please use this valuable service and tell us what your experiences were. Onward and upward! |
| 16 Mar 2023: | This week we were once again very blessed. Linda Robins, the President of the Golden West Chapter of BetterInvesting.org visited us. She discussed the goals, ideals, and benefits of this 71-year-old nationwide community of like-minded investors. She also showed us the Stock Selection Guide, BetterInvesting.org's visual tool for valuing stocks. Zoom Recording We saw that BetterInvesting.org offers a 90-day free trial of the Stock Selection Guide and also can help us find an investment club in our area that we can join or help us start our own investment club investing real money! Very cool! "Earn while you learn!" |
| 23 Mar 2023: | Hey, hey! We are only down 2%! Pretty good considering how volatile the market has been. This week we used The Value Line, the Discounted Cash Flow Model, and the BetterInvesting.org's Stock Selection Guide to thoroughly analyze Starbucks. It was a mixed decision. Some of the members would buy it but others said, "No, thanks." Zoom Recording Next week is Spring Break. Have fun everyone! On April 6th, we will have a guest speaker. Professor William Greenwald will discuss Health Savings Accouts (HSAs) and investing. It is the intersection of health care and investing and can help you save on taxes and be very profitable at the same time. Very cool! |
| 6 Apr 2023: | Our portfolio is now above water! Yippee! This week, William Greenwald, an instructor here at Southwestern and an Insurance Agent and Stockbroker (aka Registered Representative) with many years of experience in the industry, regaled us with discussions of nuts and bolts investing. He discussed getting started early, Traditional versus Roth IRAs, and Dollar Cost Averaging. Here are the documents Professor Greenwald used in his discussions: Value of Saving - Dollar Cost Averaging - Know Your IRA Options - Zoom Recording |
| 13 Apr 2023: | Ooops! We forgot to take a look at our portfolio. Check out our current results below. This week, Professor Maria Martinez-Sanabria regaled us with his expert financial statement and ratio analysis. We examined Starbucks, Chipotle, Costco, and Apple. We saw how ratio analysis can quickly give us a "birds-eye view" of how a company is doing. Of course, we need to do much more research and compare our potential companies with their competitors and the industry they operate in. Zoom Recording |
| 20 Apr 2023: | We analyzed the current predictions about a coming recession using the bond yield curve. The investment community believes a recession is coming in 2023 because the bond yield is "inverted." One member asked what should we do if we believe a recession is on the way. The answer, as usual, is, "It depends." If you have money in the stock market that you will need in the short term, it is best to pull it out now. However, if this is long-term money, just get ready emotionally for a downturn. Don't Panic! If you have money that you want to invest, why not "dollar-cost average" the money into stocks. Put a little bit each month into the money, anticipating that the recession will hit and stocks will get hammered. But who knows? Maybe we will avoid a recession? (Uh, don't count on it.) We also took a look at a portfolio that we asked ChatGPT to create for us using the concepts of the BUS-123, Introduction to Investments, class that we teach here at Southwestern. ChatGPT gave us a pretty darned good portfolio. It really doesn't reflect the concepts we teach in our class but it is clobbering both the Investment Club's and the Introduction to Investments class's portfolios. Oh, well. Zoom Recording |
| 27 Apr 2023: | Eric Benton enthralled us with his presentation about what it is like to be a short-term trader. He demonstrating the Think or Swim system that he uses with his account at TD Ameritrade and outlined the hard and fast rules that he uses to produce his results. We will follow up this discussion by introducing options, Eric's instrument of choice when trading. (If you don't want to wait, you can learn more about options and what makes them so attractive to traders by going to the BUS-123, Introduction to Investments, class website and scrolling down to Chapter 12, Options Contracts. You may also want to take a look at Chapter 13, Futures Contracts, which was the instrument of choice by another member of the club, Joshua. Zoom Recording |
| 4 May 2023: | Last week, Eric and Joshua discussed their use of stock options to faciliate their speculative trading. But what are options? This week, we used a presentation from BUS-123, Introduction to Investments, to introduce options and discussed why they are something that are best left ignored by the vast majority of prudent, long-term oriented, buy 'n' hold investors. "Instruction about syphilis is not an instruction to get syphilis!" Next week, we will discuss other great ways to lose money quickly: futures, buying on margin and selling short. Zoom Recording |
| 11 May 2023: | Last week, we learned how to lose a lot of money gambling with options. This week, we learned how to lose even more money with futures and shorting. We also discussed a serious problem that our country has with speculators using shorting to try to scare bank depositors into pulling out their deposits from regional banks in order to put the bank into receivership (aka bankruptcy). Nothing's perfect, including capitalism! Next week, we will discuss the buzz about a coming recession. Zoom Recording |
| 18 May 2023: | Our last meeting of Spring 2023! We beat the Investment Class but lost to the ChapGPT AI portfolio. But in reality, the AI just picked the 10 largest stocks in the S&P 500 a few years (which is the data that you get in the free version). And since the large tech firms in the top 10 were beaten down last year, they came back strong this year. In other words, the AI was just lucky! For our last meeting, we discussed the dreaded inverted bond yield curve and what it says about the near-term future of the economy and the possibility of a coming recession. We ended by reiterating that we need to keep a long-term perspective and realize that if the world does end, it doesn't matter where our money is. However, history tells us that for all its faults and imperfections, capitalism has been the best economic system for raising the standard of living for the global community. And it has rewarded us investors handsomely! See you in the Fall 2023, on Thursday, August 24th, at noon! Zoom Recording |
Spring 2023 Portfolio -- 10 stocks starting with $10,000 each17 February 2023: A bumpy week but we are holding our own. 24 February 2023: Volatility strikes! We are down 2 1/2%. But it could be much worse. 3 March 2023: Coming back! Tesla is our big winner so far but others are contributing, too. 10 March 2023: Ouch! Down 5% after the recent "volatility!" American Tower and Disney have really dropped. 17 March 2023: It's been a roller coaster week! We are actually up for the week. Only down a bit over 3% now. 24 March 2023: Not bad! We are now just 1% down. Could be worse! Thank you Green Brick, Microsoft, and Tesla! 31 March 2023: What a difference a week makes! We are up almost 3%! We are proud of you! 7 April 2023: Holding steady at a positive 1.8%! Not bad given the volatility. 14 April 2023: Up almost 3%! Slow and steady! 21 April 2023: Another boring week. Back down to below 2%. Pooh. 21 April 2023: The ChapGPT AI recommendations, on the other hand, are clobbering us! Check out the presentation for 20-April-2023. 28 April 2023: Hey, hey! Things are looking up! We are up 4.6%! 28 April 2023: But the ChapGPT AI is killing us! Up 12.7%! 5 May 2023: Whoa! You folks are on fire! Look at Green Brick, Mondelez, and Microsoft! 5 May 2023: But the ChapGPT AI is still making us look bad ... 12 May 2023: Up 7%. Still pretty darned good. Better than the Investment Class 12 May 2023: But the ChapGPT AI is now up almost 14%. Looks like we should just let the computers do the stock picking, eh? 19 May 2023: We ended up on a high note. Up 7 1/2% for the semester. Well done! 19 May 2023: Ouch the AI clobbered us, Dear Students! Dumb luck! |
The Industry is Actively Recruiting Women and Minorities, Bilingual, and Ex-MilitaryThe Financial Industry Wants Diversity - Great article from the Financial Times magazineBut Fortune asks, "When we will see some results?" The numbers of women and minorities are still very meager The United Kingdom has their Diversity Project Anyone want to emigrate to the UK? The Brokerage Industry is Looking for Women! The Future is Female! (And it's about time...) Here is a list of the Career Opportunity webpages of various financial and investments services companies. All feature photographs of women and minorities. The industry is serious about changing. They need you! Securities (a.k.a. Financial Investments) Vanguard Capital Group (a.k.a. The American Funds) T. Rowe Price Fidelity Investments Woman CEO! Charles Schwab Dodge & Cox Funds Wellington Management Soon to have a Woman CEO! Franklin Templeton Woman CEO! Insurance Providers TIAA Black Woman CEO! Geico Insurance Farmers Insurance State Farm Insurance Check out the hair-do! Wawanesa Insurance AIG Insurance Banks and Credit Unions US Bank Wells Fargo JP Morgan Chase Citigroup (nee Citibank) Woman CEO! Mission Federal Credit Union Woman CEO! San Diego County Credit Union Woman CEO! Real Estate Financial Services CMG Financial Rocket Mortgage Guild Mortgage Company Woman CEO! C2 Financial Corporation First American Title Insurance Old Republic Title Insurance Stewart Title Insurance There is a Future for You in the
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