SHORT INTERESTS: TIPS, TRENDS, OBSERVATIONS

Bye-bye, big boys

Large-cap stocks? On their way out, according to a survey of 61 big investment firms by Big Five accounting firm KPMG LLP. Survey respondents predicted the greatest annualized returns over the next five years will be in emerging markets (12.9%), followed by venture capital (11.7%), U.S. small-cap stocks (10.8%), international stocks (10.6%) and emerging-market bonds (10.1%). All other asset classes — including bonds, convertibles and real estate — are expected to produce single-digit returns, the study shows.

Money, art and rock ‘n’ roll

Bill Schneider, co-managing director of DiMeo Schneider & Associates in Chicago, played bass in the 1960s for the One-Eyed Jacks, a band that opened for groups like Jefferson Airplane, the Doors and the Who. A decade later the Crystal Lake, Ill., native began pursuing a more stable career — in pension consulting.

Now the 53-year-old married father of five has shown his oils and pastels, mostly landscapes, at galleries in Lake Geneva, Wis., Paulette, Vt., and most recently at Dunton Gallery in Arlington Heights, Ill.

He sells 15 to 20 pieces a year, with prices ranging up to $1,500. “It’s kind of weird that someone who knows how to paint can tear up a style analysis or asset allocation, yet he spends his Saturday afternoons sitting next to the river painting,” says Bob DiMeo, founder and co-managing director of the four-year-old firm, which advises on $5 billion of assets.

The world according to Schneider: “I plan on having an art career of 50 years or more after I get out of the pension-consulting business.”

Take that, Charon

The politics of aging makes even stranger bedfellows than the politics of politics. You undoubtedly noticed the At The Bell item (“Bill would ease IRA gifts,” May 24) noting that old-line conservative southern Republican Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina and new-age liberal West Coast Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, the sort of people you would think barely have a language in common, are co-sponsors of a bill to allow donors over 59? to transfer assets tax free from an individual retirement account directly to a charity or a charitable remainder trust.

Under current law, explains Sheldon Satisky, chairman of the estates and trusts department in the Baltimore office of Philadelphia-based Saul Ewing Remick & Saul LLP, “You can only do this by death.”

The Grim Reaper cuts across all ideological lines.