Minutes:

Minutes of the meeting of the 11th March 1998, held in TC7 at 6:30pm:

Present: Neil Barron, Milton Boyne, Steve Mantz, Arnold Spence, Martin Ayub, with Paul Garcia by phone later joined by Steve Walker.

Martin read the minutes of the last meeting.

We have now bought the software to run the club accounts, which we'll be using as soon as the issue of equalising the units had been completed.

Contrary to the report in the 1st minutes, Paul is not looking after the accounts, he was auditing the accounts that Neil had prepared. Neil continues to do all the hard work for us. Hopefully once the accounts make their way on to a PC we'll have a summary on the Web sites.

Neil read his Treasurer's report.

Psion has taken a nose dive, down £347 since purchase, £264 last month. Asda dropped £100 in the month. JJB is climbing. Signet and National Express have both increased enough to cover their purchase & dealing costs.

Current prices, Psion 306, Asda 188.5, JJB 786, Signet 37.75, NE 779.

Paul discussed the number of units held by each member. Most people hold around 320 units. As noted in the previous minutes, the plan is to equalise the number of units for everyone who joined the club at the start.

It was proposed that a quorum be the total number of people who attend or make their views known. This was voted on and agreed, unless this is a change to the constitution in which case it will have to be put to a wider vote.

Psion was then considered. With the price taking such a knock (see the sharetrack page for details), Neil wondered whether it was worth holding on to. The mood was that the company should be out of the woods regarding problems with their product, and the drop in profits, and that we should keep our holding.Milton offered to monitor the company's performance and report back on developments.

Martin will looks after Signet in this manner while Neil will look after JJB Sports, National Express and Asda.

Steve Walker suggested Pentland plc would be a good share to purchase. He presented a report on the company, and its figures. He also suggested a company called Delta, an industrial electrical company.

Neil presented reports on 3 pub chains - SFI, Old English Pubs & JD Wetherspoon. A vote was taken on buying £1500 of SFI shares, which was agreed unanimously.

This is more than we have spent in the past, but helps to reduce the effects of dealing costs (roughly £20) on our stake.

Steve Walker suggested buying into ice-cream sales in expectation of a good summer, and taking a quick profit. He will investigate this market.

The next meeting will be Wednesday 15th April at 6:30pm in TC7. Please make every effort to attend, this is your money we're spending!

Neil would like us to consider buying the book "How To Use Company Refs", which besides it's intrinsic worth also entitles you to a free copy of the current Company Refs. We are presently using a copy which Neil purchased himself, so we should think about buying our own copy.

Finally, besides the BBC intranet web page I set up last month, we now have a full blown Internet area, viewable by everyone inside and outside the BBC. I'm not sure how much information we should make publicly available, but right now it's a straight copy of the intranet area. The address is: http://www.cix.co.uk/~mayub

Martin Ayub,
Secretary.