Club Origins

A student named Bill Doty originally started the club back in 1982. He came to Professor Petersen, his economics professor, with an idea for an investment club. Bill felt the purpose of his proposed club would provide a forum in which students could learn about investments in a real situation as opposed to a game.

The problem originally was the source of the funding; at first, he thought that perhaps club members could put in their own money. However, they realized it would be a problem to cash out seniors as they left Boston College. They discovered another investment club elsewhere had raised money from alumni and invested it; this is what Doty and Professor Petersen decided to do.

Professor Petersen, on board as the club advisor, told Bill to go to see Frank Campanella and John Smith, the University Treasurer at the time. He called ahead and told them not to throw Bill out immediately, and Bill gave his presentation. He was received well, and the club was given the green light.

At halftime of the Tangerine Bowl in 1982, Bill's father donated the club's first capital infusions; between him and two of his colleagues they donated the initial $15,000 to the club. With the seed money to start the club, the Boston College Investment Club began trading in the fall of 1983.

The Early Years

According to Professor Petersen, there was probably about 25 students at a meeting back then, held in a smaller room than now. We had a broker, initially Merrill Lynch, through an alumnus friend at Merill who set us up there. He gave us discounted rates on trades back then. We moved to Smith Barney for a while, and then we joined E*trade in 1997.

BCIC has had many successes and losses over the years. Microsoft one of our best performing stocks; we were fairly early with Microsoft and investing in it. BCIC was also fairly early in investing in EMC. It was 20% of our portfolio at one point, sold a little bit at the peak, but should have sold all of it. First sale of it was at 10 times what we bought it for. We had a good performance with Timberland- a 4x gain on what we bought it for. It became a story stock because it was a trend, went way beyond what it should've been worth. The club sold before it went down too much.

One of the worst was the second stock we bought, El Chico, a Mexican restaurant. Bill Doty and George, his friend, ate at a Mexican restaurant and they decided to buy El Chico because the one they went to wasn't publicly traded. It ended up being down 67% relative to the S&P over same period. We also bought Compression Labs, which lost us 94% of its value. Most recently, Casual Male went bankrupt and then we finally got rid of it.

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Special thanks to Professor Petersen, our longtime advisor, for helping compile this comprehensive club history!