Listen up, gang! Alert the troops. I’m starting an investment club.

We’ll bill ourselves The Wild Things. Rebels without a cause. The Hanson Brothers of investing. Horn-rimmed, we’ll proudly punch the daylights out of the fundamentals and principles of conventional investing.

Our motto?

We Trade Like Jack Welch Manages, Straight From The Gut.

Our mascot?

A goat.

My pal Bre-Xer gets an honourary ‘gold’ membership.

If you pawned your wife’s jewelry to buy Book4golf.com or got hosed by buying stock in VisuaLabs (3D TV, eh?), you get to sit in the front row with Bre-Xer at the weekly meetings and wear the honourary goat’s horns.

We’ll break every rule in the book.

When the tall foreheads on Wall Street scold us for being emotional, we’ll go on a wild buying binge. When they say buy and hold, we’ll trade like mad dot-bombers and brag about it at the meetings.

When stuffy old Warren Buffett preaches realistic expectations, we’ll shoot for the moon – 25 per cent per year – and shout it from the rooftops.

And when our investment adviser calls, we’ll fire her. Straight from the gut, baby!

The inspiration for The Wild Things Investment Club came courtesy the Alberta Summit, a conference on finance staged recently at Calgary’s Carriage House Hotel by the Independent Financial Brokers of Canada. Nice deal. Only they forgot to invite Bre-Xer.

At a presentation entitled Investors Behaving Badly, investors with delightful human traits such as irrational exuberance, bull-headedness, shortsightedness, greed, impatience, denial and an E*Trade Platinum membership (for buying and selling the same stock 19 times in one day totalling commission of $521) took it on the chin, Curiously, there were no talks dubbed Advisers Behaving Badly.

Featured speaker Mark Neill, Western Canada director for TD Asset Management, spent 30 minutes telling 100 or so investment advisers the gory details of just how dumb bone-headed investors are, particularly those who don’t heed the advice of the pros.

The topic was certainly timely with the mutual-fund industry reeling over what it perceives as a disturbing trend towards do-it-yourself investing, accelerating redemption rates and declining buy-and-hold periods (a U.S. study by Financial Research Corp. shows mutual-fund redemption rates rising from 17.4 per cent in 1996 to 32.1 per cent in 2000).

Neill presented a plan for advisers confronted by mutinous investors in which an offer is made to self-invest 10 per cent of their money while leaving the balance to the adviser.

“I know advisers who have put this into practice in their businesses the last four years and have been able to come to the table and say: ‘How’s that working for you, what’s Nortel at today?’ ”

Naturally, the suits roared with laughter, relishing the line about $4-and-change Nortel Networks, which not long ago was the $100-plus darling of Canadian fund managers.

Neill’s unflattering portrayal of The Lone Investor drew approving nods all around the room.

“The solution is that individual investors should be using advisers, mainly because they have a very difficult time taking emotion out of investing,” Neill in a spiel that at times resembled a TD commercial.

“Investors think they know everything. They have unreal expectations. They fail to take your advice. They threaten to do it with you or without you. (They say): ‘If you don’t do it for me, I’m walking.’ So what do you need to do? What we’re recommending . . . ”

At that point, Neill was rudely interrupted by a gentleman bent on changing the theme from Investors Behaving Badly to Adviser Behaving Badly.

“Fire them!” piped up the fellow.

“Fire them?” asked Neill, frazzled at having someone steal his thunder.

“Yup. You bet!” replied the gentleman, straight from the gut.

Sir, you’re cordially invited to the kickoff meeting of the Wild Things Investment Club.

BYOB. Bring Your Own Bombast.

* STREET TALK: Precious metals analyst Andy Smith of London-based Mitsui Metals frowns on the increasing penchant for gold as brokerage houses scramble to hoist their target prices for the yellow metal.

“It’s getting crowded in the bull pit, worryingly so,” cautions Smith. “Like Japanese grandmothers, analysts buy at the top.”

* SAGE ADVICE: “Trading is hazardous to your wealth.”

– Terrance Odean, associate professor of finance at the University of California at Davis (after researching the investing habits of 78,000 households).

HOT ALBERTA STOCK: Parkland Industries

PKI-TSX $23.50 Up $7.30 (45.1%) on 470,500 shares (for week ending May 3). Here's yet another 'poster stock' for the Wall of Fame for boring stocks. Parkland, a Red Deer-based gas retailer, lit a fire under its stock by announcing it was reorganizing into an income trust fund, a boon to investors. If you bought Parkland a year ago, you're up 261 per cent. If you bought Nortel a year ago . . . oh, no, we don't need to go there, do we?



COLD ALBERTA STOCK:

WIRELESS MATRIX WRX-TSX $5.05 Down $1.85 (-26.9%) on 1,372,500 shares (for week ending May 3). The Wireless Matrix cup is half full, according to analyst Rob Millham of Research Capital, and half empty, according to investors who charged for the exits after the Calgary-based wireless data services company lowered its fourth-quarter guidance from projected revenue of $12-14 million to $7.4 million. Millham maintained his $9 target and buy recommendation, saying news of a licensing agreement with Schlumberger outweighed the revised guidance.