Merrill plans blue-chip fund
From The Wall Street Journal
Merrill Lynch & Co. is planning a blue-chip focused mutual fund that will be run by Jim McCall, the manager who jumped to Merrill Lynch from Pilgrim Baxter & Associates, last month. Merrill Lynch Focus Twenty Fund will be structured like the Janus Twenty Fund. It will join a growing trend of focused or select funds that contain a manager's very favorite investment ideas, rather than a diversified portfolio. Merrill hopes to begin selling the fund early next year. It will be Merrill's first focused fund and is part of a group of five new funds that the firm expects to roll out in early 2000.
OakMark misty for the past
From The Boston Globe
Throughout the early 1990s, Oakmark fund was one of the golden investment opportunities of the mutual fund industry and Robert Sanborn was considered one of the leading value stock investors. But during the past two years, the market has preferred growth stocks and a drop in some key holdings have severely affected Oakmark's returns. Sanborn has distributed his e-mail address to his investors. He reports that the letters fall into two camps: those that want the fund to maintain its current "discipline" and those that want to know why the fund is not investing in more tech stocks.
Value managers hunt for bargains
From InvestmentNews
A year
ago, many value-oriented money managers took a beating in the marketplace. Value
has recovered some in recent weeks, but not as much as its managers would like.
These managers are now buying back their stocks, which has "taken a bite" our of
everyone from giant Franklin Resources to Gabelli Asset Management, Inc., which
recently went public. These money managers of value marketplaces are often
traded at a great discount because of the beating such portfolios took in 1998.
 
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