Everett oversees all portfolio management responsibilities for the group and directs the day-to-day activities for the retail products within the Templeton Global Equity Group. He also has direct research and portfolio management duties, including formal research coverage of France and non-U.S. real estate.

He is a manager of the Templeton World Fund and Templeton Foreign Fund, along with several large offshore accounts and mutual funds. Under Everett, the World Fund has outperformed the MSCI EAFE Index, the most widely-cited benchmark for international investors, five out of the past six years.

At the end of 2002, the Templeton World Fund was invested in 129 stocks and 29 bonds, according to Morningstar. The fund's largest holding in December was Cheung Kong Holdings, followed by Swiss Reinsurance and Adidas-Salomon. Two of the fund's top seven holdings are in Hong Kong,

Everett received a bachelor of science degree in finance from Pennsylvania State University, and is a chartered financial analyst.

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All things considered, 2002 wasn't a bad year for Krumsiek's company, at least compared to the rest of the market.

Calvert operates the largest family of funds that describe themselves as "socially-responsible" investors -- a group that saw a lot of interest in 2002 as doubt and corporate scandal gripped Wall Street as a whole. Last year, Calvert reported one of its strongest sales years ever with total net sales rising 41 percent from 2001. The company's socially-screened equity funds had a net sales increase of 27 percent for the year. Barron's ranked Calvert the eighth best-performing mutual fund family for five years ending in 2002.

Although the Calvert Social Investment Fund Equity Portfolio fell 20 percent over the past 12 months, that was better than the broader market, as the S&P 500 declined 24.8 percent over the same period.

Calvert moved into equity investing in the early 1980s. The Social Investment Fund in 1982 became one of the first mutual funds to actively avoid investing in the apartheid South Africa.

At the end of March, the fund's biggest investment was in the healthcare sector, which represented 23.1 percent of the Social Investment Fund's assets, followed by 14.9 percent in computer hardware, followed by 13.6 percent in consumer services and 11.6 percent in financial firms.

Before Calvert hired Krumsiek, she spent 23 years with Alliance Capital Management, where she was senior vice president and managing director for the mutual funds division. She received a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Rutgers University's Douglass College, and a masters degree in math from New York University.

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Some people would describe screening investments for human rights practices, corporate ethics and environmental concerns as "socially-responsible" practice, but MMA Praxis prefers to call it "stewardship" investing.

If it sounds like a religious description, it is. Anabaptist faith traditions guide many of the investing screens of MMA Praxis: respecting human dignity; world peace; a concern for justice; responsible management; community support; and environmental care. "Many in the financial world mistakenly see religion and values mixing with investing only for a small niche of investors," Liechty told the Chicago Tribune in 2001. "Religion and ethical issues are cutting a much wider swath across investing than previously was understood."

Since 2000, the MMA Praxis Core Stock fund has consistently outperformed the S&P 500; in 2002 the fund lost about 18.6 percent, compared to a 22.1 percent decline for the S&P 500.

Currently the MMA Praxis Core fund is heavily invested in consumer goods, financial services and health care, which together represented more than 55 percent of the fund's assets at the end of January, according to Morningstar. The fund's largest holdings were FNMA, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, PepsiCo and Medtronic.

Liechty graduated from Bluffton College in Bluffton, Ohio in 1976 with a bachelor's degree in business and church work. He has worked at MMA for the past 26 years.

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Given his record, it shouldn't be any surprise that Malpass likes the idea of eliminating dividend taxes. What surprises him is that some of his fellow economists would disagree.

"I've been stunned at the confusion on Wall Street about the huge value of this tax cut," Malpass recently told The New York Times.

Malpass spent almost nine years working for the Reagan and first Bush administrations, including posts in the Treasury and State departments. He's also a former Republican staff director for Congress's Joint Economic Committee, and was a senior analyst for taxes and trade on the Senate Budget Committee. Among other things, he worked on the 1986 tax reform, several congressional budget resolutions, the Gramm-Rudman budget law, the savings and loan bailout, NAFTA, the Brady plan for developing country debt, and fast-track trade authority.

Although he's in the private sector now, he hasn't kept his hand out of politics entirely. He was one of 28 economists who took part in a Jan. 28 meeting at the White House, to tout President George W. Bush's economic plan. Malpass believes the plan's central feature, eliminating divided taxes, would add as much as $2 trillion on the stock market.

Bear Stearns hired Malpass in February 1993. He writes economic and financial studies, discusses financial market conditions with institutional investors, and issues economic forecasts for the U.S. and major foreign economies. From 1977 to 1983, Malpass worked in Portland, Oregon as a financial manager and as an accountant with Arthur Andersen's consulting group.

He received a bachelor's degree in physics from Colorado College and a master's degree in business administration from the University of Denver.

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