Thirty years ago, 16 little old ladies took the investment world by storm.
Aged 41 to 87, the women hailed from a small agricultural town 200 miles south of Chicago. They were retirees, teachers, homemakers, and hog farmers. Before their rise to fame, many of them had never picked up a copy of The Wall Street Journal.
Yet, during the bull market of the 1980s, they reportedly turned a few hundred dollars into six figures, outperforming even veteran bankers.
Dubbed the “Beardstown Ladies,” they pumped out best-selling investment books, embarked on multi-state speaking tours, and made the rounds on primetime TV.
It was the perfect story about a group of underdogs who used common sense, intuition, and Midwestern grit to beat the market.
That is, until it all came tumbling down.
The formation of the Beardstown Ladies
In the early 1980s, Betty Sinnock — then a bank teller in Beardstown (population 6k) — developed an interest in the
booming stock market.
She’d seen customer after customer drop off big dividend checks and she couldn’t help but wonder: If these people can make money on stocks, why can’t I?
But there was a problem.
To buy stocks, she needed a broker. And as Sinnock later told a local paper, brokers “didn’t want to deal with an old lady.”
When her calls went unanswered, she decided to start her own
investment club.
She banded together with Shirley Gross — a retired medical technologist in her 70s who’d also had trouble finding investing resources — and put out a call for other local women who wanted to take control of their finances.
On November 3, 1983, they officially formed the Beardstown Business and Professional Women’s Investment Club — or the “
Beardstown Ladies” for short.
The 16 Beardstown Ladies (via “The Beardstown Ladies' Common-Sense Investment Guide”; Hyperion, 1995)
Eventually, the group settled on 16 members — all women, many of whom were working-class retirees:
• Hazel Lindahl, 87; retired school nurse
• Sylvia Gaushell, 82; retired art teacher
• Helen Kramer, 78; retired bank officer
• Lillian Ellis, 77; retired dental assistant
• Shirley Gross, 77; retired medical technologist
• Elsie Scheer, 76; retired farmer
• Ruth Juston, 75; dry cleaning business owner
• Maxine Thomas, 73; retired bank teller
• Doris Edwards, 72; elementary school principal
• Carnell Korsmeyer, 67; hog farm owner
• Ann Corley, 66; retired homemaker
• Betty Sinnock; 62; bank trust officer
• Ann Brewer, 60; secretary
• Margaret Houchins, 53; flower shop owner
• Carol McCombs, 44; insurance agency employee
• Buffy Tillitt-Pratt, 41; real estate broker
Most of the club members didn’t know how to read annual reports or analyze price-to-earnings ratios.
But the group boasted no shortage of life experience: Among them, they had 30 children, 40 grandchildren, and 7 great-grandchildren. They’d lived through wars and depressions. They could slaughter pigs and fix broken engines.
How hard could trading stocks be?
A news clip from the early ‘90s (via
newspapers.com)
To start, each woman ponied up $100, plus $25 per month in dues.
Every Thursday evening, they convened to learn about the market and discuss which stocks they’d buy with their pooled funds. Each woman would follow a particular stock, then report her findings to the group.
The club’s process for identifying good stocks was a mixture of intuition, research, and “good old-fashioned leg work.”
As self-proclaimed “fundamentalists” (or
value investors), they gravitated toward stocks they felt were underestimated by the market. They’d call up CEOs and pore over publications from the investment research firm
Value Line, selecting stocks that fit several criteria:
1 The stock price had to be under $25 per share
2 The stock had to have at least 5 years of solid growth
3 The company
had to be in one of the 25 largest industries
4 The company had to have debts less than ⅓ of its assets
5 The company had to have a strong track record of leadership
6 No vice stocks (tobacco, liquor, gambling)
But their analysis went beyond the numbers.