The Event

For the last three months we have been working on an event for our Waddell and Reed Clients in Northern Nevada. My inspiration for "The Event" is Warren Buffet's "Annual Meeting" for his company Berkshire Hathaway. He has many of the companies his company is invested in come to Omaha and they have a convention show like meeting. (Sees Candy, Net Jets, Gieco Insurance, and many others) The highlight of the meeting is Warren's report on the company.

So we asked to have Zack Shafran fly out for our meeting. Zach is the head of global research for the invesmtment division of the company and the manager of the $4 Billion in assets in our Science and Technology funds. We arranged for Tim Ripp of Associates of Clifton Pak to come from Albany New York. He is our expert on long term care and medicare. We also got Andy Rex our Nationwide Financial wholesaler to come over from the bay area. Bill King also came in from Kansas City.

The company was kind enough to fly Zach out on the company plane so as to minimize his time away from his investment management responsibilities. We had a lot of work to do to make sure that all of our materials and presentations would meet with legal, compliance and marketing department's approvals.

For the first 90 minutes we had food and drink at the Carson Valley Inn, had some mini workshops with our special guests and showed a video of some of our new materials from the Ivy Funds. You can see the videos at www.ivyfunds.com/theworldcovered. Then at 7:30 we had Zach come on. I introduced Bill King and he in turn said some nice things about me and introduced Zach.

We had about 190 people in attendance and the event seemed to be a success. It was a lot of work to put on by me , Bo and Janelle. I think I have a new friend and ally in Zach Shafran. He is a big Boy Scout supporter as well as a big time ski enthusiast. I'm sure it's not as big a deal as Warren Buffet's meeting but he has been doing his for a while and this was our first go at it.