Five Tips for Starting a Successful Investment Club.

Successful investment clubs share a few common characteristics. To help ensure that your club succeeds, follow these five tips:

1. Join StockCentral. The StockCentral is a community of individual investors and investment clubs that offers educational workshops, online stock analysis tools, data, and community forums that can help your club get started. The Clubhouse forum on the site is a great resource for getting answers to questions about starting and running a club, and the weekly "Join the Club" column by Amy Rauch-Neilson will give you great ideas about improving your club's operations.
2. Agree on an investing approach. Members of successful clubs share a unity of purpose. If some members in a club want to pursue short-term strategies, and others prefer to buy and hold, the resulting discord will doom that club to failure. All members should understand and abide by the club's approach to investing.
3. Think long-term. Even in an online club, it can be difficult (if not impossible) to manage a short-term investing strategy, where decisions to buy or sell stocks need to be made very quickly. A long-term, buy and hold philosophy -- planning to own every stock for five years or more -- has proven to be the best approach for the majority of clubs.
4. Use your computer. Software makes the number-crunching part of club recordkeeping and investment analysis much easier to bear. ICLUBcentral offers club accounting software that's been around since 1989, which should be every club's second investment (after a StockCentral membership). Visit myiclub.com for details on our online club accounting and operations web site, or visit the ICLUB.com web site for details on Club Accounting 3 for Windows. Also, the Internet provides terrific resources for investors, and e-mail is a great way to communicate with fellow club members, whether your club meets online or off.
5. Education is key. Clubs that operate with the primary goal of educating their members about investing will find that profits naturally follow.