aundra Williams grew up in a part of Richmond County, N.C., where there wasn't enough money to cover the monthly bills. Forget about investing.

Yet today Williams, 34, an assistant professor at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, sports two substantial investment portfolios. Like thousands of other women, Williams learned about investing through a women's investment club.

These clubs have been spreading like wildfire in the three years since the Beardstown Ladies published their folksy books about investing their way to riches.

"In the last three years, two out of three new investment club members have been women," says Tom O'Hara, chairman of the National Association of Investors Corp., which represents 700,000 members in 38,000 clubs. Overall, NAIC membership is now half women, and about a quarter of all clubs are women only.

How well are these women doing with their portfolios? Better than men, according to the annual surveys the club conducts. "Two-thirds of the time the women are ahead," O'Hara says. "Women have outperformed the men in 11 of the last 17 years."

An investment club pools the money of a dozen or so investors, usually novices, who meet once a month and contribute anywhere from $5 to $200 each.

The club picks stocks based on research done by members. The NAIC also provides information on picking mutual funds, but clubs generally stick with stocks. When you decide to leave a club, your contributions and gains are calculated and you collect your money.

O'Hara, 83, set up the NAIC in 1951 because a survey he did of clubs showed that the successful ones followed certain investment principles. The association aims to help clubs double their money every five years.

It's hardly surprising that women's clubs are growing, given the publicity garnered by the Beardstown Ladies. Even the recent news that the Illinois group miscalculated its returns hasn't dimmed the enthusiasm of women investors.

"They still did pretty well," says Peggy Price, who organized the Wine Country Women's Investment Club in Santa Rosa, Calif., in May 1995 after seeing the Beardstown group on the "Today" show.

There are other reasons for the growth of women's clubs, however. Many women say they prefer learning about investing in the company of other women, where they don't feel intimidated or afraid to ask a basic question.

Women's magazines have picked up on this and run dozens of articles about clubs. "The publicity we've received has been very heavily in women's magazines," O'Hara says.

What's the secret of women's success in clubs? They study harder and admit their mistakes more quickly, O'Hara says.

"From what we see, men are kind of victims of just being men," he says. "They tend to talk to their friends and accept rumors and tips instead of doing their research. But women learn the principles quickly."

There is some evidence, too, that women approach investing differently. "They say that men are more analytical," Williams says. "But I think women are more well-rounded. We look at all the aspects of a company. Women also look at the human side of things."

And, according to some women investors, they use more common sense. "Men might study and do their research and look at all the charts," says Lorrie Gustin, a member of the Ticker Tape Tamales in Milwaukee. "But in the end, it's a seat-of-the-pants decision. They get charged up about something and they buy it."

The story of how Saundra Williams came to join a club is typical. A decade ago, with a master's degree fresh in hand, she was working at a full-time day job at Northern Telecom, teaching college calculus courses in the evenings and thinking about completing her doctorate in education.

When she was offered the opportunity to contribute to her employer's 401(k) and to buy company stock, she realized she'd have to do some research.

At about the same time, the mother of one of her students invited her to a meeting to set up an investment club. Williams was suspicious. "I had fixed in my mind that it would be some kind of pyramid scheme," she says.

Instead, the mother presented the idea of setting up a club of African-American women who would pool their money to invest. "She had already checked with an attorney to see if this was permitted," Williams recalls.

The club was set up immediately. It wasn't until some time later that members were introduced to O'Hara's NAIC, with its investing guidelines.

A very quick learner, Williams dived into the volunteer network, teaching other women how to study stocks and how to start an investment club.

She also teaches a five-week stock study program for prospective members. "They have to choose three stocks and make a presentation, and then we vote on whether to accept them as members," Williams says.

Williams' club invests online with E*Trade. "We don't see any point in paying a broker when we're doing the research ourselves," she says.

Williams gets a lot of mileage out of that research. She and her husband, Dennis, who also belongs to a club, are busily building a family portfolio in addition to their club portfolios.

Lorrie Gustin has been investing with the Ticker Tape Tamales in Milwaukee since before Williams was born. In the late 1950s, Gustin, now 72, was asked by her husband to take over the family's investment portfolio.

"He was busy building a business and when we became successful, he needed someone who knew about money," Gustin recalls.

Gustin tried working with brokers. She tried going to workshops. But she just couldn't get it. "Everybody talked way above my head," she says.

Then she met three women investment club members at a cocktail party and joined as soon as the club had an opening.

Like Williams, Gustin now has several stock portfolios. Her favorite is the one she started with $500 her husband gave her to invest back in the mid-1960s. "That was a lot of money for us back then," Gustin says. "It took me a year and a half to make a decision."

In 1965, she bought five shares of Teledyne. That investment paid for a $3,000 trip to Europe that she took in 1966. "The '60s were great for stocks," she says.

Gustin grew so proficient at investing with the Tamales that her husband asked her to manage the loss reserves at the small insurance company he operated. She did. But it resulted in some run-ins with her husband, Walter.

"His idea of investing was to listen to a guy he never met," Gustin says. "Men have a gambling instinct rather than common sense."

Like thousands of other women, Peggy Price came to investing by way of the Beardstown Ladies. Price saw the group on the "Today" show one morning in early 1995.

She called the NAIC to get information on how to set up a club and solicited members of her tennis group in Santa Rosa, Calif., to help her form the Wine Country Women's Investment Club in May 1995.

Price, 50, says she knows of at least five other clubs in Santa Rosa who started at the same time based on the Beardstown Ladies' success. The 15 women in Price's club each put in $500 to start and each adds $30 per month. Price subscribes to Value Line to do her research.

But she also read One Up On Wall Street, by Peter Lynch, former manager of the Magellan Fund and one of the most successful investors of our time. Lynch advocates buying companies that make products you like. Price and her club do just that.

Price's club bought stock in Costco "because the (company stores') parking lot was always full," Price says. The stock of the discount warehouse chain has since tripled.

They also bought retailer Gap "because we all loved Baby Gap and saw how busy they always are," Price adds. Gap stock has more than quadrupled in the past 24 months.

Altogether, the club's portfolio has averaged 40 percent appreciation a year since May 1995.

Like most investment club members, Price is building a second portfolio on her own. "I spend two or three hours a day online," she says. Although the Wine Country Women use a broker, Price trades through eSchwab for her own account.

Of course, the biggest challenge for investment club members is not picking stocks but holding onto them when the market heads down.

"Where they fail is after the market is off for six or eight months. They give up and lose all the opportunity of buying when the market is low," O'Hara says.

He has plenty of experience with that. In going through his old records - he's been an investment club member for 58 years - O'Hara says he found that the market hit a peak in 1965 and "then didn't do anything for 18 years."

His club kept investing every single month. "What we tell folks is: 'Remember you are not buying the stock market,'" he says. "'You are buying individual companies.'"