This week we've opened the doors to new members, so I just wanted to put a quick note in the forums to say a big WELCOME to our latest batch of capital allocators.

Excited to see what fresh investing talent we can uncover!

I've posted this in the Member Backgrounds thread so you can learn more about some of the other members of this rag-tag collective of share market tragics, and perhaps introduce yourself if you are new to the community. (Just click on the 'forum post' link above )

Once we finish the reopen, probably this weekend, we'll hold an induction session for new members. But if anyone has any questions in the meantime, please DM me here on Strawman, or just post a question in the forums (we're a friendly group, so don't be too shy!).

Of course, if anyone would like to refer a friend, please let me know. We'll give your award balance a $100 boost for each successful introduction..

Welcome all, and thanks for sharing. I love reading these introductions.

So great to have such an engaged community. And the diversity in everything (be that age, experience, background, or whatever) is a huge strength.

Looking forward to a productive year.

Hi everyone,

First,  I will point out that I never intended my username  MissPiggyBank to go public. So embarrassing! I tried to change it but couldn’t so I’m stuck with it and will try to embrace it hence the pic of a diamond crusted piggy bank to add a splash of style and sophistication.

I don’t usually participate on discussion boards, I’m one of those people who are happy to follow along in the background enjoying everyone else’s intelligent conversation.

I’ve been interested in share market investing now for almost 10 years and have a small portfolio which to be honest I built it from watching and listening to the experts on Foxtel’s now defunct ‘Your Money’ program. Now I listen to podcasts i.e. The Call (Ausbiz), The Motley Fool and Baby Giants. The catalyst for my leap into creating my own small portfolio came when I was frustrated with the measly interest rates the banks offer and decided that I would be far better off buying shares in a bank then putting my money into a term deposit. My strategy has worked and I have managed to maintain a nice portfolio, although there have been some doozies, not mentioned the ups and downs. I’m still very much a rookie and am learning new things all the time.

My reason for joining The Strawman Investment Club is so that I can step up my knowledge but also learn from like-minded investors and find new investment ideas. I like Andrew’s investment style. I got a sense of it through listening to The Call podcast when he was a guest and then when he became Scott Phillips’s new side kick on the Motley Fool podcast. I like how Andrew unpacks various investing scenarios in an easy-to-understand way, plus he has a unique ability to be able to pull out a well-timed quote, always with humour!

It is possible that I am in a minority group in the club… I am closer to my sixties than fifties, became a mother later in life, my teenage son thinks investing is gambling, I work full time on a low-income wage, studying part time  (Fine Arts), like Andrew I am a renter (likely to be lifetime renter), and I am also single (divorced 5 years ago), so it’s even more important that I make my money work for me. That’s pretty much why I’ve decided to join The Strawman investment club.

Look forward to getting to know everyone.

Miss Piggy Bank aka

Sandra (Sandy)

Hi folks,

Just stumbled across this forum thread and figured an introduction is in order!

Husband (Lawrence aka Lo; author of this post) and wife (Michelle aka Shell) investing team based near Box Hill in Melbourne's east. Stumbled across SM by accident around March of 2022 and have been lurking ever since until recently taking the paid membership plunge. Still learning the ropes around here in our spare time and still feeling pretty sheepish given our lack of investing street cred.

Michelle's a clinical child psychologist; the yin to my telecomms/software engineering yang. We have a 2 year old daughter + 2 Bengal cats to contend with at home along with an out of control suburban permaculture garden. We're die hard foodies mourning the absence of travel in our lives ever since the daughter + COVID double whammy happened simultaneously.

Our investing journey to this point is more of a non-investing journey. Our respective academic studies kept us busy + FCF negative until around 2013, at which point we became gainfully employed and fled rental apartment living by mortgaging ourselves to the teeth to buy a house. Every spare $ since then went into our mortgage offset account and investing had been relegated to the mental too hard basket until we finally got our act together last year. We read, watched and listened until we hit information overload, and finally plucked up the courage to place our first ASX trade in October of 2021... little did we know how much of a trial by fire the 2022 new year had in store for us!

We're primarily investing with a high risk tolerance for medium to long term capital growth, with a smaller portion of the portfolio targeting near term income generation to supplement Michelle's part-time income while she focuses the majority of her work hours on being primary carer to our daughter.

In the spirit of "keepin' it tight", I'll leave it there and say that we look forward to continuing to interact with the SM community and hopefully can contribute some value back into the pool as we get more settled in.

Cheers,

Lawrence & Michelle