To be fair I suggest it will be even more onerous to get to the point of having chosen three shares to vote to buy (given my comments previous) and decide which three of the existing shares to sell (again see previous) and not actually more efficient at all, hence my reservation in one angle.Beachboy wrote:I am not trying to be deliberately obstructive but would just like to understand the rationale because all I can see at the moment to support it is that is 'easier' to process.
It also doesn't take into account holding any shares for income as they can just be chosen to be sold when "some of us get fed up with them losing paper value" and neglect to remember why we have them in the portfolio. We then just become a quick profit sale kind of club which I worry about as the risks of losing money are even higher than holding for income and seeing the prices fluctuate over time... FTSE100 is not the best place to select a share that is going to make us a quick buck.
To be honest, concluding within a week has been possible in most if not all our votes, as the ones I have started I have also manually ended/locked the results. I'm not sure how long underdog's polls have taken as I wasn't really in the state of mind to realise that.
If we look at the effect of having purchase thresholds it has actually saved us money. We have bought shares on a number of occasions when the initial offering price post the end of a poll has been above that agreed and waited until it has fallen back to a better price.
The long and short of it for me is we need to improve:
a) The process of suggesting shares - to buy based on some agreed parameters, such as strict FTSE100 & FTSE250, no shorted shares, company reports have been read and balance sheets checked for impending debt of doom etc... so we can do our best to avoid the NCCs, Carillions, TRUs, Maplins, Carpetrights and so forth.
b) Agree on why shares put forward are being so, what would trigger a sell if we held them (might not just be a stop:loss setting... but perhaps a profit warning or something similar), what our goal for the share is to exit etc...
c) We need to have ownership of our shares by members - I'd suggest each share we collectively own is "owned" by two members, who will promise to keep abreast of news, developments and read the key reports from those companies when published. This would make us far more aware of events and chat affecting our money. Those members could then provide periodic updates or notify the club members if some urgent consideration needs to be made.
Hindsight is a great thing but I think we should consider the way forward in light of what past decisions we have made as it is probably not having strict enough parameters and lack of monitoring that have led to some of the bad decisions we have made.
I also think we should see where the common ground is among members to suggest what they like and dislike about any of the stuff mentioned so far.