Newsgroups: biz.americast.samples
From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com
Organization: American Cybercasting
Subject: SIDE LINES
Date: Sat, 29 Aug 92 14:53:54 EDT

This is an actual portion of the electronic edition of Forbes, as
distributed by American Cybercasting.  For more information, send e-mail
to usa@AmeriCast.com or write to POB 575, Aurora, OH 44202.

SIDE LINES

Seeking the personalities behind the numbers

AS A FULL SCHOLARSHIP STUDENT studying English and German at
Texas Christian University, Suzanne Oliver had a definite if some-
what unfocused career goal: She wanted to write for glamorous
national magazines. Oliver would have scoffed if a fortune teller had
predicted that a half-dozen years later she would be writing about
business and finance. But that's just what she is doing at FORBES_
and doing extremely well. Oliver, 27,
did much of the editing and generat-
ed many of the ideas for the articles in
FORBES' 37th Annual Fund Survey.
 When we did the first survey, in
1956, open-end funds were a step-
child in the financial community_
which saw in them a rival for retail
brokerage-and in the financial me-
dia-which saw them as arcane and
faintly disreputable. Performance fig-
ures were not easily available, so you
bought a fund largely on a salesman's
say-so. FORBES recognized early the
potential of the fund phenomenon
and the need for more information.
 Today mutual funds are a formida-
ble force, with combined assets of $1.5 trillion. The 184 funds
covered in our first survey have grown to 1,652 in this one. Dozens
of other publications publish fund surveys, but ours remains unique.
Most just give raw numbers on straight-line performance. Their
measurements are merely quantitative; ours are qualitative as well as
quantitative. Thus our honor roll; thus our Best Buys lists.
 What does it feel like for an English/German major having to
wallow in all these statistics? I asked Suzanne. She reminded me that
she had groaned when I first asked her to take the assignment. ''I
looked around the business press,'' she recalls, ''and saw how boring
most mutual fund stories were. But once I jumped in I saw there was
a real challenge in digging out the personalities and the policies that
produced the numbers. I now realize that writing about business and
finance is a lot more intellectually stimulating than interviewing
celebrities about their sex lives and their diets.'' To which I would
add that reading about funds is a lot more stimulating when someone
like Oliver does the editing.
 John Chamberlain and Tina Russo McCarthy assembled the
considerable database that underlies the ratings. The survey begins
on page 85.

A useful scare

WAS THE TAKEOVER wave of the 1980s an entirely bad thing, as we are
regularly reminded by the media? No. For all the turmoil they
caused, takeover and the threat of takeover wonderfully composed
the minds of lots of boards that realized they might lose their
companies if they didn't cut costs, eliminate bad investments and
speed up product innovation. In this issue we relate two examples of
companies that got their acts together only after they were shaken up
by the threat of takeover. Today  Industries (page 45) and Perkin-
Elmer (page 44) are among our leanest, best-run companies.

JIM MICHAELS
Editor
 
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