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Interesting Facts

Welcome fellow investors

We the members of Massive Investing Promotes Savings (MIPS) have been a team for over 20 years. With each passing year, we seem to learn something more regarding investing. We are now a team of 5 members and we are happy you reviewing our site. We hope that there is something here that you may be able to use to enhance your organization and increase your portfolio.

And How It All Began

This investment club started as a result of someone's thought and dream. Craig Fackler, a long time friend of Marvin Miles and Michael Collins. Both Marvin and Craig worked together in Oklahoma at Kerr McGee Oil Company in the Information Systems Group. Besides trading programming thoughts, they spoke often about the stock market. Craig was a math major and therefore had this idea that he wanted to create a mathematical model of the stock market. He was sure he could become successful at predicting stock prices. Craig's wife Donna worked at Dean Witter Reynolds and convinced Craig to try and start an investment club. Craig tried to get a club started in Oklahoma, but could not get the interest of many people.

Later Craig moved to Dallas and began working for Sprint. After some time new positions became available in his group and he recruited Marvin from Oklahoma. Both Craig and Marvin befriended Michael Collins. Mike also started working at Sprint and had an interest in stocks. All three had their own portfolio and would often discuss strategies on what they were doing with there stocks. No matter where these guys were the subject of stocks would always be a part of the discussion. Since Craig had a house, Marvin and Mike would usually visit Craig two to three times a week to discuss the stock market over several beers in the family garage. Melvin Adams developed a friendship among the three and was accepted into the 'gang'. He also had a big interest in the stock market, but was the least knowledgeable in this area. The four would often meet at Craig's place for beers and stock discussion. Craig continued to discuss the idea of an investment club. As these ideas continue to foster, the appeal became greater and greater.

During the summer of 89 Marvin decided to go ahead and send off to the National Association of Investment Clubs to get a manual on how to start an Investment club. Donna also gave us a list of local clubs we could visit to see how an investment club operated and get questions addressed. We then came up with an example of a Partnership Agreement and Bylaws and prepared for a kickoff meeting to see how many people would be interested in starting a club with us.

On November 1989, we held a kickoff meeting to introduce the concept of starting an investment club and the benefits we saw in doing it. The main benefit we saw was that we could invest a small amount of money and combine it with other members and buy stocks. It was also an educational experience that would allow little investment and shared loss or gain. We had about 15 members attend the kickoff meeting.

After the first kickoff meeting we then had to decide on a name for the club. We came up with the name of the club during a happy hour at Chili's. As we consumed several beers, the ideas of a name began to develop. We decided to use an acronym that would be twofold: a) have a meaning that was common to our profession and b) could also be used to identify our club. The first acronym we thought of was ISPF, which is a programming command set environment. We came up with a club name of ' Investing & Savings Preserves Freedom'. This name was quickly ruled out by the four of us. We then thought of the acronym, MIPS. This stands for 'Millions of Instructions Per Second for a computer standpoint'. We came up with two translations for this acronym: a) Men's Investing Primarily Speculative and b) Massive Investing Promotes Savings. The unanimous decision was choice B.

In December 1989, we had our first meeting and everyone brought checks and postdated them as of January 3rd 1990. We decided to officially start the club in January because of tax reasons. The first order of business was to elect officers of the club so we could conduct business. Dave Antes was elected Presiding Partner. He was our Director at Sprint so we thought he would be a good choice. We decided to assign our broker to be Roy Bell of Dean Witter Reynolds.

During the early meetings of MIPS we spent most of the time doing administrative duties and less time discussing stocks. We did not have much money but we were slowly building up cash to purchase stocks. Most of our first purchases were stocks purchased through DRIP (Dividend Re-Investment Programs). This program allowed the purchase of stocks without commission fees. We later restructure our meeting agenda to focus more on stocks preserving a small amount of time each to ensure the administrative components were considered.

This was presented at our 10 year reunion in Las Vegas ...