Bull sessions
Hawaii stock market investors
By Russ Lynch
find strength in numbers by banding
together in clubs
Star-BulletinPeople who spend weeks or months choosing a home appliance or new car sometimes take just minutes to pick a stock, says Ryan Muraoka, who started an investment club called Millionaires in Training in 1994.
"You're dealing with your life savings but you get a hot tip and you just turn it over to someone else," said Muraoka, one of the organizers of the Investors Fair scheduled for Nov. 14 at the Hilton Hawaiian Village.
Muraoka and other representatives of the fair's organization, the Aloha Hawaii Council of the National Association of Investors Corp., said the daylong fair will stress the ownership aspect of investing.
"When you're investing in a stock, you're buying a business," or at least part of it, said Gordon Ching, a retired federal employee and an investment club member.
Ching said it is important to know as much as you can about the company or fund whose shares you're buying.
Investment clubs, of which there are about 80 in Hawaii, pool their money and meet once a month to analyze their investments and decide where else they might invest.
"We look at fundamentals, like the balance sheet and long-term debt," Ching said.
The stock market price and what it might do in the next days and weeks isn't as important as the basics, the NAIC representatives said in a recent interview.
"There are certain companies that got beat up on Wall Street but are sitting on a lot of cash," Ching said.
"You need to kick the tires and look under the hood," said Muraoka, a former Procter & Gamble Co. sales representative.The typical investors club consists of friends, perhaps co-workers, who pool some money to start building a fund to invest and then put in a set amount each month.
Mike Tave, retired owner of Creative Furniture Warehouse, started a club at the beginning of this year, called the Oahu Millionaires' Club. He got interested because of a Star-Bulletin article a year ago about the 1997 Investors Fair.
"It's friends, a couple of doctors, a CPA, some retirees, businessmen, a judge, one college student," Tave said.
Each put in $500 to get the club going and they add $50 per person per month. Every member participates in the investment decisions. Everybody is supposed to learn how to analyze a company," Tave said.
Decisions aren't made lightly and there is no rapid movement, the investors' club representatives said.
Most investments are for the long haul and the clubs don't get worried about rapid rises and falls in the market like those occurring this year.
Nationally, the NAIC offers computer software and other educational aids to help clubs make the right decisions.
One of the NAIC's products is a book, "Investing for Life," which is aimed at teen-agers, advising them to "own your own share of America." The NAIC's aim is to "recruit the next 50 million investors," Muraoka said.
Hawaii's first investment club seems to be the Wiki Kala ("fast money") Investment Club, formed in 1961 by members of the American Association of University Women. Many of the clubs give themselves amusing names. For example, Honolulu Fire Capt. Mike Chung and some of his fellow firefighters got together a few years ago to form FIRE, Friends Investing for Resource Enhancement.
Patt Emminger, a Makiki Heights resident, called her club Profit Oriented Investors so it could have the acronym POI.
Their purpose is serious, however, turning a relatively small amount of savings into long-term money growth.
The Investors Fair on Nov. 14 will put the Hawaii clubs together with chief financial officers and other executives of a number of leading companies in the stock market, including Agouron Pharmaceuticals Inc., AirTouch Communications Inc., Lucent Technologies Inc., Nokia Corp., OM Group Inc., Venturi Technologies Enterprises Inc. and Worthington Industries Inc.
There will be exhibits by those companies and some local businesses, such as Pacific Century Financial Corp., Hawaiian Airlines Inc. and Hawaiian Electric Industries Inc. Company presentations will be made throughout the day.
The keynote speaker at lunchtime will be high-technology stocks expert Michael Murphy, chief investment officer of Murphy Investment Management, a registered investment adviser specializing in technology stocks for private accounts and manager of three no-load mutual funds. Murphy is the founder of the California Technology Stock Letter and author of "Every Investor's Guide to High-Tech Stocks."
Taking stock
What: 1998 Investors Fair
