During the middle of 1998, five of us, who were all colleagues working for Corus plc. [formerly British Steel] in South Wales, United Kingdom, began talking about the possibility of starting an investment club.

We did a little research [mainly on the internet] and discovered that there are already lots of investment clubs in the United Kingdom as well as elsewhere in the world. You can find some of the UK sites here.

We also discovered an organisation called PROSHARE which has produced an excellent manual to help investment clubs to get started with the minimum of difficulty. We used this manual to help us to develop our RULES and CONSTITUTION. If you are thinking of starting your own club then buy this - it makes everything very simple.

In September 1998 we decided to start the club which we have called "The Fair Shares Investment Club". We decided to keep the membership to five while we established ourselves and set up things like club officers, bank, stockbroker etc. and we have now expanded the club over the last few years to its full allowed membership of twenty.

Our investment philosophy is quite simple - we are willing to take a fair degree of risk and have a long term target of 1% growth per month. We are nearly all in full time jobs and feel that short term trading is not realistic and mainly lossmaking in any case. We try to buy only shares in companies with a proven record of making profits and paying dividends and with a realistic P/E ratio. We normally intend to hold shares permanently unless we feel that the prospects of the company have changed in a fundamental way.

We have found it too demanding to keep this website up over the last few years but intend to have another go now.