SHORT INTEREST: TIPS, TRENDS, OBSERVATIONS

EDITORS (GASP!) TO RUN FUND

Strong Funds of Milwaukee has tapped two Hammond, Ind.-based newsletter editors to run yet another new investment product based on the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the Dow 30 Value Fund.

New to the game are Charles Carlson, editor of the DRIP (for dividend reinvestment plan) Investor newsletter, and Richard Moroney, contributing editor to Dow Theory Forecasts. “We’ve got five days worth” of hands-on experience, Mr. Carlson jokes.

Half the assets will replicate the price-weighted Dow. Other stocks will be gleaned from among the highest-yielding “Dogs of the Dow.” The duo also will screen stocks based on the usual ratios. Among their favorites: Hewlett-Packard.

Net gain for gays

Walter B. Schubert, the only openly gay member of the New York Stock Exchange, has launched a financial services Web site for gays and lesbians. Later this year, the Gay Financial Network, at www.gfn.com, plans to offer electronic banking as well as investment, mortgage and insurance services to the estimated 4.8 million gay men and lesbians on-line.

“The site provides a discrimination-free environment – you’re just a screen name,” Mr. Schubert, president and chief executive of the New York brokerage SGI Ltd., recently told InvestmentNews sister publication Crain’s New York Business. “If you’re in a committed relationship, it’s still hard to go into a bank and ask for a mortgage. It’s like coming out all over again.”

White nights

Jack White & Co. is boasting that advisers who attend its third annual conference in its home town of San Diego late next month won’t have to pay for the third night of their stay at the conference hotel. The free night at the luxurious Hyatt Regency is available “thanks to the generous support” of 77 conference exhibitors.

In other words, mutual fund companies and other sponsors will not only be paying Jack White for the right to exhibit their wares, they’ll also, in part, be underwriting advisers’ expense
s to attend the event.

No word yet on whether sponsors will provide free piggyback rides to the exhibit hall.

Was it for the chocolate?

Just two months after it launched the first U.S.-registered mutual fund to invest entirely in mainland China, the Guinness Flight Mainland China Fund lost its portfolio manager, Nerissa Lee, to the Banque Generale of Belgium.

Ms. Lee, who also ran the Guinness Flight Asia Small Cap Fund, left the Pasadena, Calif. office of Guinness Flight Investment Management Ltd. during the first week of January.

Modeled after the offshore Guinness Flight Select China Fund, the Mainland fund, launched Nov. 3, is not for the faint of heart: It finished 1997 down 5.5%.

Steve Daniels, Sandy Hock and Wendy Hong