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Biotech / Medical : Oncothyreon -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: debra vogt who wrote (757)	5/16/1999 10:16:00 AM
From: ogod	Respond to of 2344

if a bioteck fund is what u r looking for have a peek at this:bck.un-tse, they are taking four companies public this year, own a whack of qlt at very low prices/bvf/etc very interresting/ as for biomira i will sell into a gap open and take my chances on buying it back down the road, good luck everybody

To: debra vogt who wrote (757)	5/16/1999 10:33:00 AM
From: Bill on the Hill	Respond to of 2344

debra, More information about that new fund. Bill on the Hill smartmoney.com Atom Smashers? Cancer? What??! By Danny Hakim "ATOM SMASHER" isn't a phrase you often see on the resume of a mutual fund manager. Then again, Kinetics Holding Corp. isn't your average mutual fund company. Information about the founders of the Internet fund and the new Bio-fund. smartmoney.com You remember Kinetics -- the group that started the Internet Fund (WWWFX) out of a retired postal worker's house in North Babylon, N.Y. (see story). After it struck a deal in March (it isn't closed yet) to sell the highflying Net fund, we frankly didn't expect to hear from the company again. We should have known better. Having moved to cash out of one of history's hottest investing trends, Kinetics has its sights set on another. It has filed a registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission for a new fund called Medical Fund & the Cure for Cancer (no ticker yet). It's the first mutual fund to focus exclusively on companies searching for cancer cures and treatments. So where do atom smashers come in? The new fund's co-manager (and Kinetics' new president to boot) will be Bruce Abel, a project engineer at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, a research facility on Long Island, N.Y., funded by the Department of Energy. We were as curious as you probably are about what qualifies a research scientist like Abel to run money. But he isn't talking since the fund is currently in its regulatory "quiet period" before it opens for business. The company's latest Internet Fund filings with the SEC don't list Abel among the officers, so it appears he has come on board recently. We did call Brookhaven to find out what exactly Abel does. While his bio doesn't mention an M.B.A., he does oversee the cooling systems in BNL's atom smashers. What's an atom smasher? Basically, it's a really expensive, subterranean ring where physicists watch traffic accidents between tiny particles traveling near the speed of light. BNL has two. There's the new, $600 million "Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider," which is 2.5 miles long and goes by the alias "Rick." Then there's the older, 1.5 mile long "Alternating Gradient Synchrotron," which has generated four Nobel prizes. "We're trying to break apart subatomic particles and atoms to see what's inside," says Kara Villamil, a spokesperson for BNL. Synchrotron? Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider? Mutual Funds? Sure it's an odd mix, but Abel will be helped out by co-manager Peter Doyle, the son of Kinetics' last president, Margaret Doyle. He's a portfolio manager at Horizon Asset Management, a small Madison Avenue money manager, and one of the founders of the Internet Fund, which has the best returns in the business over the past 52 weeks, according to fund tracker Lipper. Does the biotech sector offer the same kind of opportunity? Depends on your investing philosophy. On the one hand, the Lipper Health and Biotechnology sector has been the year's worst performer, down 3.17% year-to-date. It's the only fund category to lose money so far in 1999. On the other hand, that gives Abel and Doyle plenty of chances to value shop. Eli Lilly (LLY), the Indianapolis pharmaceutical giant and cancer researcher, has fallen 21.7% from its March 3 high. And the biotech and pharmaceutical fields are filled with battered leaders like Schering Plough (SGP) and Amgen (AMGN). Certainly, the Internet Fund will be a tough act to follow. Since the beginning of the year, the fund's assets have exploded from $22 million to $747 million as manager Ryan Jacob has racked up performance gains of 108%. Jacob even has his own online fan club. Can Abel top that? Hey, if the guy can smash atoms...