SHORT INTERESTS: TIPS, TRENDS, OBSERVATIONS

Get those resumes ready

More and more kids are getting into the Stock Market Game — literally. Since 1997, there’s been a 62% increase in the number of New York City students engaged in simulated trading, where teams, in grades 4 through 12, compete to squeeze out the highest return from a $100,000 paper portfolio. The game’s sponsors, the Securities Industry Association/New York District’s Economic Education Foundation, say 13,772 students from 295 schools participated this spring, vs. 8,780 from 268 schools last spring.

In this year’s game, a team of 12th graders from Somers High School in Lincolndale, N.Y., shared first place with four 11th graders from New York’s TMSTA Yeshiva High School for Boys. Each team’s portfolio was worth a tidy $174,573 at the end of the 10-week competition. What did the winners get in return? Stock, of course: six shares of Advest Inc., which trades in the $27 range, courtesy of David Weprin, managing director of public finance of the company and New York district chairman of SIA. And $300 in cash. Warren Buffett, eat your heart out.

In decor, less is more

Evidently, Christopher H. Browne, president of Tweedy Browne Co. LLC, wants to make it perfectly clear that nothing has changed at the New York firm since it was acquired late last year by Affiliated Managers Group Inc. In a proxy recently mailed to mutual fund shareholders, who must reaffirm Tweedy Browne as investment adviser following the deal, Mr. Browne wrote, “We are now six months into our arrangement with AMG, and we can say that they have done exactly as they said they would: They have left us alone.”

The proof? The Tweedy Browne principals all have signed 10-year employment contracts and retain equity in the firm. They also are personally invested in their own products. And the kicker: “In addition to the firm’s day-to-day operations remaining unchanged,” Mr. Browne writes, “we have the same bare walls in our offices and the same tacky polyester plants.”

OK, we believe, we believe.

Zweig straight-up

Zweig Funds’ new Euclid Market Neutral fund, named for the father of geometry — and the avenue in Cleveland where Marty Zweig lived as a boy — will be the first in a series of new equity funds that don’t hold cash. The firm will launch at least one more Euclid fund by yearend, says David Katzen, senior vice president of Zweig/Glaser Advisors, and stock picker for the $65 million fund. It attempts to offset market risk by holding long and short positions in hundreds of stocks. He also picks stocks for other funds with Mr. Zweig, who sets the asset allocation.

While those funds have about 15% in cash — and can have up to 100% — the new ones won’t have any. Mr. Katzen says the $1.3 billion Zweig Strategy Fund would have beaten the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index by 220 basis points each year from the end of 1989 through the first quarter of 1998 — if it weren’t for the cash portion. What’s Mr. Katzen’s quantitative strategy? “I try not to be biased toward growth or value.”