Revival of the Investment Club

We at JPJ think it’s great to currently see the re-emergence of ‘Wider Share Ownership’, a Thatcherite encouraged movement in the 80’s privatisation era.

There has recently been a revival of the Investment Clubs, which bring together a variety of friends and family members who typically meet over a glass or two in a pub once a month to offer their thoughts and observations and together decide how best to invest or play the stock market. They are not in a main particularly experienced but like buying and selling shares on collective opinion.

There was for example the lady shopping at Tesco’s, who noticed that the checkout counter was getting larger and larger every week and surmised that they must be doing rather well. The clubs investments in Tesco was handsomely rewarded. Some companies were targeted because of their ‘shareholder perks’ such as Sketchley which gave 30% discount on dry cleaning bills and Channel Ferries which offered 25% off their fares. There were many others at the time and they will come again.

For all these reasons the Investment Clubs were massively popular 30 years ago when there were approximately 20,000 but they largely fell away following the dot com implosion and then during the 2008 financial crash.

Now the current Bull market is attracting them back. So far in 2017 incorporations have been the busiest in 5 years. One online broker currently has 2,000 individual investment clubs on its books.They are socially fun, easy to open and there are online manuals offering advice. The crowd funding investment trust will be the next big phase in the ever-growing alternative finance phenomenon.