Investment clubs, advice flourishing on the Internet

Never has it been so easy for investors to educate themselves about the stock market and inexpensive to accumulate securities, according to Charles Carlson, author of "The Individual Investor Revolution."

But these advantages don't stop with individual investors. These days, teams of investors also can reap those rewards by capitalizing on the Internet.

The Web has made it easier than ever to form and operate investment clubs. Even members who live in far-flung points nationally can run clubs by meeting online.

The latest entrant to the online investment club field is the women-focused Web site www.chickslaying

nesteggs.com.

"What we are trying to do is create a place for women to go and have all the (research) tools available to them," Karin Housley, a founder of the site, said in a telephone interview from her home in Calgary, Alberta. Housley is author of the book "Chicks Laying Nest Eggs," to be published next spring by Crown Publishers.

The Web site, an abridged version of the book, gives the blueprint for how Housley and nine other women organized an online club and created a portfolio that grew more than 50 percent in two years.

Chickslayingnesteggs.com guides clubs through formation, partnership, operation and research. Before year's end, the site will allow clubs to hold regular meetings in chat rooms and link to brokerages to place transactions.

The National Association of Investors Corp. also has a Web site for its 36,000 clubs. While www.better-investing.org, provides the framework for club creation and operation, it does not host meetings online. Even so, its buy-and-hold investment strategy and its emphasis on investor education has made the National Association of Investors one of the nation's prime resources for starting and operating investment clubs.

A separate organization, the American Association of Individual Investors, has 170,000 members nationally. These are individuals -- rather than clubs -- who use online, software or other computerized resources to educate themselves about investing. (For more information, call 800-428-2244, or visit www.AAII.com.)

Finally, there are other popular Web sites that offer full hosting for investment clubs and their meetings. Perhaps the best known is Yahoo's group-based Clubs site, in operation since August 1988. On the www.

yahoo.com home page, choose "clubs" and, on the linked page, choose "investments" under the directory.

"We provide our users a suite of communications tools and a permanent home on the Web that they can use to interact and build relationships," Mark Hull, senior producer for Yahoo! Clubs, said. "Clubs can have their own private chat rooms, their own private message boards, their own portfolio calendars, address books and other tools to manage their site."