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Strategies & Market Trends : VOLTAIRE'S PORCH-MODERATED -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Murrey Walker who wrote (49433)	4/3/2002 2:49:14 PM
From: elpolvo	Respond to of 65232

mur- lissen up you are 95% in cash thus you are not a participant in anything in fact dude, you may not even exist. i'll even bet the photo of your grandkid was a forgery. be reasonable murrey!! yer fren, -polvie

To: Murrey Walker who wrote (49433)	4/3/2002 5:19:17 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 65232

WSJ.COM:Stilwell Financial Gives Janus Staff Equity Stake By: Ian McDonald THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE Wednesday April 3, 5:00 pm Eastern Time NEW YORK -(Dow Jones)- Janus fundholders are still betting on their humbled stockpickers and on Tuesday the Denver outfit's bosses doubled down. Stilwell Financial (NYSE: SV - news) Inc. (SV) doled out a 6.2% stake in Janus Capital, a deal announced on Feb. 15 . As promised, a 5% one-time grant will vest after seven years and another 1.2% will be handed out annually, vesting after five years. The move, designed to retain staff and boost fund performance, raises Janus employees' stake in their division to 8% and the vesting schedule accelerates if Janus funds meet performance targets. Some 180 Janus employees received shares, though The Wall Street Journal reported on Feb. 19 that Janus' 65-member investment team would get most. While Janus managers frequently tout their large stakes in their firm's portfolios, this grant should do even more to put the Denver outfit's stock pickers and their shareholders on the same side of the table. Stilwell has said they plan to distribute 20% of Janus Capital ownership to insiders, paving the way for more carrots down the road. "From the [fund investor's] point of view, it's very positive to give your portfolio manager a share of the company," says Philadelphia -based fund consultant Burt Greenwald. "It ties them in, but also links their compensation to the success of the firm and its funds." Neither the funds nor the firm have done well over the past two years. In the late 1990s, many of the firm's funds jumped on the technology bandwagon with both feet, riding it to outsized gains and pulling in large amounts of new money. The average Janus stock fund rang up a 74% gain in 1999, compared to a 21% rise for the S&P 500, according to Chicago research house Morningstar. But those bets became ballast after the Nasdaq's peak in March 2000 . At that point the firm's retail stock and bond funds had $219 billion in assets, according to Boston fund consultancy Financial Research. Thanks mostly to investment losses, the funds had $103 billion in their coffers on Feb. 28 . The high-octane Janus Twenty fund, for instance, posted a 65% gain in 1999. Now the fund, which is closed to new investors, averages a 15.8% annual loss over the past three years. That trails the S&P 500 by more than 13 percentage points and 94% of the fund's peers according to Morningstar. In the 12 months ending Feb. 28 , just one in four Janus stock funds met or beat its average competitor, though three-quarters of the firm's stock funds do so over the past five years. Steep recent losses seem to have tamed the firm's approach. Recent portfolio data illustrates a less tech-heavy, more diversified style. Less aggressive funds like the Janus Growth & Income fund and the Janus Core Equity fund kept their bets modest and fared better than most of their peers over the past three years. Shareholders have been surprisingly stalwart in the face of losses. Even though many of Janus' largest funds are closed to new investors, redemptions have been relatively light. They seem to be standing pat with their bet on the firm's managers, underscoring Stilwell's incentive to keep those folks on board. "Janus has a fairly big group of younger-generation managers and they obviously want them to stick around," says Russ Kinnel, director of fund research at Morningstar. "They've got a lot riding on them." Shareholders could say the same. -Write to Ian McDonald at ian.mcdonald@wsj.com