Buyers covers "healthy and active lifestyles" companies -- a niche that has her following a broad range of products, including golf clubs (Callaway), motorcycles (Harley-Davidson), boating supplies (West Marine Products), snowmobiles and other recreational vehicles (Polaris Industries), exercise equipment (The Nautilus Group), and nutritional supplements (NBTY). Oh, and so-called healthy food firms, including United Natural Foods, Whole Foods Market, Wild Oats Markets, Horizon Organic Holding and Hain Celestial Group.

The healthy lifestyles sector as a whole is expanding more rapidly than other consumer sectors, Buyers noted in a report published at the end of 2001, a year that saw the industry growth speed up even as the rest of the economy slowed down. And one of the fastest-growing parts of healthy lifestyles is natural and organic food.

Among the food-related companies, she has "outperform" ratings on Horizon, which produces organic milk and juices; United Natural, a wholesale distributor of natural and organic products; and Whole Foods, which has dominated the retail market for natural foods in recent years. She's especially enthusiastic about Whole Foods. "We love the sound of this broken record," Buyers wrote in a February report on Whole Foods.

RBC hired Buyers in 2001. She has spent seven years in the financial industry, including two years with Hanifen, Imhoff and two years with fund manager United Capital Management. She got her MBA from the University of Colorado at Boulder and bachelor's degree from the University of Albany.

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Among other things, Milton covers restaurants for Standard & Poor's equity research group, but that doesn't mean he thinks the sector is in great shape right now.

He has a "neutral" rating on the restaurant industry currently. Fast food restaurants in particular -- the subject of this week's program -- are suffered in a "fiercely competitive" environment marked by price cuts and lower margins, Milton notes. And so-called "casual dining" restaurants are taking business away from fast food chains because the population is aging, and older people prefer full service, Milton says.

Milton, who covers some specialty retailers in addition to restaurants, has been with S&P since March 2001. Before that, he was director of planning and procurement for the Milton Can Co., which hired him in 1994. From 1992 to 1994, Milton was a lawyer with Waters, McPherson & McNeill, in Secaucus, NJ. Columbia University gave Milton an MBA in 1999. He got a law degree from Villanova University in 1992, and received a bachelor's degree in economics and history in 1989 from the University of Virginia.

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Whether you see him as a master of "public interest" law or a "legal terrorist" filing idiotic suits, Banzhaf's impact is undeniable.

"What really gets John Banzhaf going is being on the short side of a long-odds fight," according to The Washington Post. "He likes to position himself as a little fellow with a pickax, digging away at social ills and wrongheaded industries."

Banzhaf made his name almost four decades ago as one of the driving forces behind non-smoking sections in public areas, smoking bans on airplanes and mass transit, and the removal of cigarette ads on TV. He has sued private clubs over the issue of admitting women, former Vice President Spiro Agnew to recover money from bribes received, and Washington, D.C. dry cleaners to force them to charge the same fees for men's and women's shirts. Banzhaf and his law students have taken on bus safety, warnings on birth control pills, airplane smoke detectors and food labeling.

That last one is a big issue for Banzhaf these days, as he pounds the table for fat people suing fast food restaurants. Banzhaf argues fast food companies have increased American obesity by failing to clearly disclose their menus' nutritional content (or lack thereof). The record of legal success so far has been mixed: a court dismissed two suits filed by overweight individuals claiming they were deceived by fast food firms, but the judge also told the plaintiffs how their cases could be strengthened, and gave them time to refile. And last year McDonald's did agree to settle a Banzhaf suit by paying $10 million and apologizing for wrongly labeling beef-flavored French fries as vegetarian.

Although he doesn't make money from the cases themselves -- Banzhaf has an unpaid adviser to the fast food plaintiffs -- his critics decry him as a publicity hound. He is frequently quoted in publications and television programs such as this one, and in his classes on legal activism, he does talk about "care and feeding" of the media.

The last 35 years notwithstanding, Banzhaf didn't set out to be a legal gadfly. His undergraduate degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was in electrical engineering, has two patents to his name, and obtained the first copyright ever for a computer program.

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Predicting the market isn't easy, but for the last few years, McManus has made it seem that way.

Many of his calls have been spot on since the company now known as Banc of America Securities hired him five years ago. He's been especially accurate for the past three years -- at the beginning of 2000, McManus' timing was impeccable, as he moved his "Fresh Money Focus List" away from technology and into stocks likely to endure a down market. In 2002, the 10-stock list fell 11.9 percent, outperforming the S&P 500 and strategy portfolios of 14 other strategists, according to The Wall Street Journal.

But McManus recently returned to a bullish forecast; in October, he increased his equity rating to 70 percent, and earlier this year, he put tech stocks in his Focus List for the first time in two years. McManus' current list includes: