Women of a Certain Age

Women of a Certain Age
Crested Butte Market Mavens
By Sandra Cortner

If the Beardstown Ladies Investment Club could strike it rich in the stock market, surely we could, too. In the golden decade of the 1990s for America’s Wall Street, fifteen of us banded together in 1997 to form the Crested Butte Market Mavens Investment Club. Each anted up $250, with monthly dues of $30 earmarked for our stock buys. Getting women to join was tricky.

“Invest? I’ve got $561 in a savings account...”

“I think I’m all in mutual funds… Gotta ask my husband.”

“I don’t have a clue about stocks…”

Once we had commitments, our tax ID number, bylaws and membership agreements, we set goals: learn, diversify, strive for a 10 percent annual return, and, best of all, have FUN. The fun started each meeting night at 6:30, when we arrived at a member’s home, potluck dish in one hand, sheaves of notes detailing stocks in the other. Or, in the case of some, a bottle of wine. For me, the monthly meetings were a dual learning experience. I used the diners as guinea pigs to test new recipes. The honest anonymity of the buffet line told me if the dish was a hit.
Afterward, we’d settle into chairs and couches or curl up on the floor, reading glasses perched on our noses, intently listening to a member present a stock report. Sipping coffee or the dregs of the wine, we’d try to make a decision by 9 p.m., before warm full tummies closed our eyes and shut down our brains and we’d spend our money based on gut reactions:

“I don’t like Qwest – they gave me shoddy service when I moved my phone to the studio.”

“Qwest is a great company. Wow, fiber optic lines along the road right of way, brilliant idea.” (Little did I know that 15 years later the company I championed would deny me high-speed internet access via these lines.) We subscribed to “Valueline,” a weekly stock analysis guide with five years of price, earnings, highs, lows, a summary of the company’s business, etc.; completed comparison sheets and read articles such as “Six Steps in Picking a Stock”. Since I was a “buy a stock, watch it go up and watch it go down before selling” investor, it was good discipline for me to let go at the 10 percent return point.

For each meeting, I researched a stock using the internet, and then chose a new recipe using “Cooking Light, The Something Special Cookbook”, and my old standby, “The Joy of Cooking”. Others were reciprocating. I’ll never forget one woman’s lemon meringue pie with its flaky crust reminiscent of my mother’s. Another refused to let transportation woes deter her from the meeting. She arrived by motorcycle clutching her husband’s waist and balancing a tray of hors d’oeuvres.

Choosing by committee was a tricky, occasionally sticky proposition. However, we muddled through and by 2002, we owned about 12 stocks – Home Depot, Harley Davidson, Sunrise Assisted Living among them. Because many of us were cautious newbies, we often spent the first month’s meeting reviewing a stock, the next meeting deciding to buy it and the third meeting bemoaning that it had already dropped below our purchase price. “But we are in it for the long haul, right?”

That lack of fearless nimbleness prevented us from making big bucks in the dot com era when the market would see a daily leap of 400 points. We invested in Cisco, but avoided Yahoo and Amazon. Thus, we avoided the crash in 2000. But our dreams of striking it rich crashed as well. By January of 2003, members began to peel off. At our June meeting we said goodbye and divvied up the pot, small as it was. My final check was nowhere near the $2400 or so I’d contributed over the years, but I met at least two of the goals – learning and having fun. The only rich I got was Marcia’s Rich and Easy Chocolate Cake recipe.

Sandy Cortner founded the Crested Butte Pilot newspaper in 1972, worked for the Crested Butte Chronicle and Pilot, and writes for all the local magazines. Most recently, her book, “Crested Butte Stories…Through My Lens” was reviewed in the Mountain Gazette and her photos illustrated an article on Tony’s Tavern. The book is available locally and at wildrosepress.com.