SHORT INTERESTS: TIPS, TRENDS, OBSERVATIONS

How you play the game

As if yearly performance reviews weren’t enough, employees of Ohio-based Nationwide Financial Services Inc. are being reduced to playing board games – management’s way of educating its staff on how individual performance affects the bottom line.

The twice-monthly game is part of the curriculum at NFS University, Nationwide’s employment training program. Teams of three or four players run a fictitious company for a simulated three years, paying bills, borrowing money and finding investors. Chance cards show how natural disasters can affect the company’s bottom line.

Why not just play Monopoly?

Axa me no questions

Those French weren’t standing behind the door when the chutzpah was passed out, but they can’t tell irony with a magnet.

(Chutzpah: what the guy who killed his parents displayed when he asked for mercy on grounds that he was an orphan.)

Axa-UAP SA, the gigantique Parisian insurer, is somewhat miffed that in this country it really is an anonymous society, which is what the French call corporations. As you recall, it wants to change the name of its Equitable Cos. to something with more Gallic flair, but it hasn’t figured out how to do it just yet.

Still, that hasn’t stopped the company from making a big splash on cable this month, sponsoring a four-part miniseries on the A&E channel. At every commercial break, up pop bright red bar charts with Axa’s name, then Equitable’s, sort of a front-end piggybacking.

Oh, the miniseries. It’s about Horatio Horn- blower, C.S. Forrester’s fictional English naval officer at the turn of the 19th century. His permanently defeatable opponents are, you guessed it, Napoleon’s French.

It’s CFA vs. CFA on $ OK

If you thought the alphabet wars were coming to an end as the International Association for Financial Planning and the Institute of Certified Financial Planners hop closer to a merger, you’ve got another think coming, reports Investment-News sister publication Pensions & Investments.

This time it’s AIMR, the 32,000-member Association for Investment Management and Research. The battle is over who gets to be called a CFA, or chartered financial analyst.

Directors of the New York, Philadelphia and Boston societies, each of which predates nine-year-old AIMR, are urging a “no vote” on a proposed change that says if you don’t pay your dues, you can’t call yourself a CFA. Currently the 5,600 inactive members are still CFAs, albeit in limbo.

Something for nothing?

Phillips Publishing International Inc., a Potomac, Md.-based newsletter outfit, has put its star editors online, offering free analysis of funds run by Fidelity Investments, Vanguard Group and others. Contributing to the site – www.mutualfundflash.com – are Daniel P. Wiener of the Independent Adviser for Vanguard Investors, James H. Lowell of the Fidelity Investor, Douglas Fabian of Fabian Investment Resources and Jay Schabacker of Mutual Fund Investing.

As Mr. Wiener says, “It goes without saying that everything given away for free is some sort of marketing tool.”