This is the final article in Globe Investor's Investing Heroes series, in which we profile prominent investors and exploring their investing strategies. We started with an interview with Stephen Jarislowsky and a profile of William O'Neil .
Betty Sinnock is talking about one of the biggest mistakes her investment club has ever made. Early on, in 1987, they bought shares in The Fur Vault Inc., a fur retailer, at $8 a share.
“I had chosen it because the fundamentals looked like it was supposed to really grow,” she recalls.
It was about the time when anti-fur activism began to go mainstream and, that year, the winter was quite warm. Pretty soon, the stock price dropped to $6.75 and the club had a decision to make: Stick with it or sell? Afraid to hurt the feelings of Ms. Sinnock, the rest of the group decided to hold on – and did so until the stock was at about $3.
“We sold it then,” Ms. Sinnock says. “It went down after that, till it was gone. … That was a learning experience.”
It's a cautionary tale for any investment club: Preventing hurt feelings can be costly.
Ms. Sinnock's investment group isn't just any club, though. She's a founding member of the Beardstown Ladies, probably the most famous and influential investment club in history. The group of 16 women, with an average age of 70, became international celebrities in the early 1990s when they were plucked from obscurity in tiny Beardstown, Ill., and given television appearances on CBS's This Morning show after being a star club in the National Association of Investors Corp. for years.
Those appearances led to a book deal and more television spots. Pretty soon, the ladies were everywhere. The Beardstown Ladies' Common-Sense Investment Guide – which included investing advice and the ladies' favourite recipes (Ms. Sinnock's was Betty's Shoepeg Salad), was a huge bestseller, selling 800,000 copies. Other books followed.
