SHORT INTERESTS: TIPS, TRENDS, OBSERVATIONS

Ready for prime time?

Andrew Horowitz never completed college, but you’d be wrong if you said the Hollywood, Fla., financial adviser wasn’t book smart. Apparently hoping to give Oprah a run for the money, he is setting up a link from his own website, www.Investment-Advisory.com, to cyber bookstore Amazon.com. He’ll post his own reviews of financial books on his site, and readers who want to buy them can click on an icon there and order directly from Amazon.com.

But unlike Ms. Winfrey, Mr. Horowitz, who oversees $60 million in assets at the firm that bears his name, gets a 15% commission for each book bought from his site. He insists he’s not in the book game for the money. “An educated client is a better client,” he says.

Apropos of the cyber age, Mr. Horowitz and representatives at Amazon.com negotiated the deal without ever meeting in person. “We did everything electronically,” he says. “I never talked to anybody.”

No-Load, but lots of issues

When Sheldon Jacobs began putting his own money into mutual funds in the mid-1960s, they “were considered appropriate for people who were too dumb to buy stocks,” says the 68-year-old adviser and editor. But a change in attitudes helped fuel the industry’s explosion, along with the staying power of his No-Load Fund Investor: The monthly newsletter marked its 20th anniversary in January.

When Mr. Jacobs mailed the first issue in 1979, the mutual fund industry’s assets were a mere $56 billion; that figure has ballooned to $5.3 trillion.

The newsletter, published out of Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y., has about 18,000 subscribers and covers 995 no-load funds. Mr. Jacobs opted to concentrate on no-load offerings because he says he “always believed in buying things at a discount.”

In the 1960s, he notes, fund commissions could exceed 8.5%. “This was at a time when most people’s heads were on buying individual stocks,” he says.

Of course, with today’s investors going wild over Internet stocks and a growing number of advisers pitching their stock-picking services, the conventional wisdom may be about to change once more.

Hot, hot, hot

Sure it’s a shameless publicity stunt. N’awlins-based Pan-American Life Insurance Co. kicked off its new 401(k) effort by sending bottles of 401(kayenne) pepper sauce (get it?) to the financial media.

Also in the cardboard box was a press release, curled up diploma-style and bound with a piece of straw, touting the firm’s regional consultants, account managers and a menu of investment funds from firms like Dreyfus Corp., Vanguard Group, Neuberger Berman Funds and Franklin Resources Inc.

OK, maybe the idea isn’t so hot. But the sauce sure is.