Our Portfolios, Ourselves

Sisterhood is Enriching, Women Investors Find
By Reed Abelson

No one would ever confuse the women of New York's 008 Investment Club with the Beardstown Ladies. The Ladies became famous last spring for their homespun and highly successful investing style, even though they have never ventured far from their tiny Illinois farm community, where you can still leave your car door unlocked. Many of them never went to college, some never worked outside their homes - and they are all smalltown enough to have put recipes for broccoli casserole and angel food cake in their best-selling book about their experiences.

But the women in the 008 club, despite their high-profile jobs in fashion and real estate, board positions at Mount Sinai Hospital and the Guggenheim, and fondness for black in August, have taken their text from the Beardstown Ladies. For while they may dine with such investment gurus as Byron Wien of Morgan Stanley and be married to men who run Revlon and other huge enterprises, they, too, believe they have a real need, as women, to learn about money.

"Whether you come from Beardstown or you come from New York, you're in the same boat, " said Diane Terman Felenstein, the new club's founder and president. "Women should be caretakers of their own financial future."

Although she has run her own public relations firm for more than two decades, Ms. Felenstein had recently come to realize how little she knew about estate planning and investing. She had watched women friends, suddenly widowed or divorced, struggle to make the most basic of financial decisions. In speaking to stockbrokers over the years, she found she didn't begin to know what questions to ask. And the brokers weren't about to help her out. "I can't believe, she said, "how deficient we are."

This is the story of how Ms. Felenstein and her friends are trying to counter this dangerous ignorance. They have plenty of company. Among the 17,004 investment clubs that belong to the National Association of Investors Corporation, nearly 41 percent are all women, 46 percent are mixed, and just 13 percent are all men. The all-men incidence is just half of what it was 10 years ago. While the success of the Beardstown Ladies is one reason for this imbalance, another is more depressing; fear of the financial difficulty that many women, even some of the well-heeled, can fall into in old age. That makes investment clubs a very serious business for them, and it shows in the results. From 1985 to 1994, in average annual return, all-women clubs outperformed all-men groups every year but three.

But a look at the 008 also speaks to the struggle for anyone, man or woman, to learn about a discipline as complex as investing. And, from a different angle, the tale shows how being rich and connected - the club includes Carol Levin and Pat Weinbach, for example, whose husbands respectively head Revlon and Arthur Andersen - can make learning much easier for the fledgling investor.

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