I‘m pretty sure at least of few of these ladies went missing for a few days after this picture was taken and some probably drove back to Rancho Santa Fe via San Jose…

 

Dow Divas make a difference for the opera

 

By James ChutenoonJan. 11, 2014

Members of the Dow Divas gather for their monthly meeting. The group will be donating $500,000 to the San Diego Opera.
It’s been a good 12 months for the Dow Divas Investment Club, which generated a 23 percent annual return in 2013.

“Our husbands are so jealous,” said Iris Lynn Strauss, the club’s president and, with Faye Wilson, its co-founder. “They don’t want to think that we’re smarter than they are, and they don’t want to take advice from us, but I would venture we do better than they do.”

That may be accurate, but you’d have to consider it on a husband-by-husband basis, as the club’s impressive return was still a little short of the 29.6 percent gain achieved by the S&P 500 in 2013. (“The big, high-quality dividend growers in their portfolio were underperformers in 2013,” explained the Divas’ investment adviser, Jeff Dunigan.)

But it’s indisputable that during its 18 years, the 22-member club comprised of opera donors has done extremely well — well enough to donate $500,000 this year to the San Diego Opera and to plan and cover the cost of the opera’s annual opening night gala, scheduled for Jan. 25 at the Civic Theatre.

“These are smart women,” said Strauss about her colleagues, who comprise a who’s who of influential women in San Diego’s cultural community. “They are committed, they are serious, and they do their research.”

That’s a far cry from 1996, when Wilson was looking around the room at a charity event.

“I thought, everyone one of these women, either through divorce or death of a husband, is likely to be managing money alone,” said Wilson, who has an extensive banking and business background. “They should at least be able to know enough to judge their advisers and the performance the adviser provides for their portfolios.”

She approached Strauss, who affirmed that many of the individuals in the room “couldn’t even read the financial pages of the newspaper.”

With investment clubs all the rage (the Beardstown Ladies’ best-selling book came out in 1994), and their mutual interest in opera (Wilson was the board president at the time), Wilson and Strauss incorporated the Dow Divas Investment Club.

They agreed to keep the membership relatively small (20-25 partners), hold regular educational events, charge monthly dues to build up an investment portfolio, and require a minimum donation to the opera as part of the membership requirements.

The organization now has 22 members who pay quarterly dues of $500 and individually support the opera at a level of $25,000 annually or above. It meets monthly, where each of its members is responsible for reporting on one of the stocks in its approximately $500,000 portfolio. A rotating committee of three members also gives monthly reports on new stocks for consideration.

Options are discussed, and the group votes on what to buy, and sometimes more critically, what to sell.

“People become very enamored of their stock,” Strauss said. “They never want to sell, though we do. There’s nothing wrong if a stock peaks to take some cash and make some profit, but we have sometimes waited too long.”

Dunigan, who is affiliated with UBS Financial Services, acknowledges the discussions often get heated — even to “operatic” proportions. But he’s impressed and encouraged at how cohesive the group is. Once a vote is taken, the acrimony ends.

“The second it’s over, it’s over,” Dunigan said. “There’s no looking back; there are no grudges. I think men passively-aggressively hold grudges that women, or these women, don’t.”

Although a large part of his role as adviser is educational, Dunigan says he’s learned a lot from the Dow Divas.

“Whether it’s the women in the group who are highly sophisticated investors or the women who are not: They all have an intuitive streak that I don’t think men have,” Dunigan said. “The investing world is predominantly a male world, and all its traditional metrics are male metrics, all of the ratios, price to earnings, price to book, you know, debt to net equity …

“I’ve seen the Dow Divas look at that, analyze that all, then go in the complete opposite direction. They are much more subjective and intuitive, and often, it’s that subjective component of the analysis that turns out to be the one that’s right.”

The husbands might not want to hear that.

jim.chute@utsandiego.com • Twitter: @sdutchute • Facebook: facebook.com/utartmusic