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To: Glenn D. Rudolph who wrote (87201)	12/12/1999 8:37:00 PM
From: Jan Crawley	Respond to of 164684

latimes.com Through the first 10 months of 1999, Americans plowed more new money into tech-sector stock funds--$17 billion--than they did in the previous 10 years combined, according to fund tracker Strategic Insight in New York. By contrast, the 1998 net cash inflow into tech-sector funds was a mere $600 million. The avalanche of cash this year into tech mutual funds provides at least a partial answer to the question: Who's been bidding up tech stocks lately? Tech fund assets in total now stand at about $71 billion, up from $33 billion at the start of the year. But the surge in money inflows also is setting off alarm bells among some analysts, who fear it could be indicative of a peak in the tech-stock mania--at least, if history is a guide. To be sure, the tech-fund sector, led by such giants as T. Rowe Price Science & Technology, Fidelity Select Electronics and Alliance Technology, still is small overall: It holds less than 2% of total stock fund assets. But investors have become so enamored of the funds that, in one November week, the tech sector attracted $2 out of every $3 that went into equity mutual funds. Performance, obviously, is what's driving this: The average tech-sector fund has gained 112% thus far this year, compared with 19% for the average diversified stock fund. But the tech funds' performance was spectacular in 1998 as well--when the average fund in the sector rose 51%--yet the sector's inflows were nothing compared with this year's. Which has Christine Benz, a tech fund analyst with fund tracker Morningstar Inc., wondering: Are many fund investors, perhaps fearing that they missed the '90s tech rally, trying to make up for it all at once as the decade comes to a close? "That's certainly a possibility," Benz says. And if so, are they too late? Many analysts have prematurely laid the bull market to rest in recent years, of course. Still, Alan Skrainka, chief market strategist for St. Louis-based brokerage Edward Jones, notes that cash flows into sector funds "can be an incredibly reliable indicator of market and sector peaks." * * * set Allocation Advisors, a money management firm in Walnut Creek, Calif. In the 10-year period ended December 1989, the average Japan fund delivered average gains of 22.6% a year, according to fund tracker Lipper Inc.