by C.J. Leleux
The original meeting of the Mutual Fund SIG took place on the first Wednesday night in April 1992 from 6:00 to 8:00 PM with about 10 members in attendance and the SIG leader. The intention then, as now, was to assist each other in learning how to make money with investments in mutual funds.
By using the computer and investment software we could increase our information base, which would assist us in making decisions of when and in which funds to invest. We had been using the library, financial newspapers, financial magazines and recommendations given by several investment gurus including the author of the Mutual Fund Forecaster.
We had members of the American Association of Individual Investors in our group and the AAII financial sources were available to us, such as the quarterly mutual fund up date and the AAII annual mutual fund manual.
We had several engineers in our group who delighted in crunching numbers, so we began to use spreadsheets to both monitor our portfolios and create tracking charts with the data we generated.
This led to seeking more data either on a monthly or a daily basis. One of our members suggested we try the Mutual Fund Expert program and we bought a trial membership in that program.
Later someone asked about Investors FastTrack which had daily adjusted net asset values on mutual funds in its database and so we got a subscription to that program. As additional members came into our SIG, they wanted stock data as well as mutual fund data.
This led to the creation of the Computer Investing SIG which meets weekly on Fridays. Once a month was not often enough for these active investors.
One of the members brought in the TeleChart or TC2000 program which has daily data on stocks and mutual funds. Norm Feldman, one of our members wrote software programs; GRASP, GRIP, GOTCHA and TCGRASP which are add-on programs for Investors FastTrack and TC2000.
These programs allow the investor to see an entire family of stocks or funds graphically on a screen at one time. The programs also have digital data on performance for the various families over any time period the user desires.
In addition, someone brought in MetaStock, the premiere charting program and demonstrated that program to our group.
MetaStock has more technical analysis than any other program we know of. It takes data from other programs and allows the user to create charts and rankings not available in other programs.
A new program we are evaluating is Quotes Plus which has all of the stocks in the NYSE, the NASDAQ and the AMEX. They advise us they will soon have additionally all of the mutual funds in their database and program. We look forward to this new program. The use of these various programs brought about the need for the Investors Software 101 SIG. This SIG allows us to demonstrate to our members the uses of the various financial software programs with hands on training in the LAB where we have 12 computers plus the computer for the presenter.
To date we have had over 1,200 HAL-PC members come through our SIGs. They come and they go after having learned what they need and want to know. We have about 60 to 120 active members who show up each Friday for our various meetings. Each Wednesday, Dorothy Valego of our SIG, posts the meeting contents of the Fridays meeting in the Mutual Fund message area of the HAL-PC BBS.
C.J. Leleux is a HAL-PC member and leader of the Mutual Fund, Computer Investing, and Investors Software 101 SIGs.
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