McAlinden joined Dean Witter InterCapital as senior investment strategist in 1995 and shortly thereafter became the new chief investment officer of InterCapital -- now Morgan Stanley Investment Management. He directs the daily activities and all related duties of the investment department, and directs the investment policy of Morgan Stanley Dean Witter Advisors. He also sits on the board of Morgan Stanley Dean Witter Trust Company.

Showing up for work on Sept. 11 last year almost got him killed. McAlinden's office was on the 72nd floor of the World Trade Center's second tower, and he was eating breakfast on the 66th floor when the first tower was hit by a terrorist-piloted plane. He was 45 seconds from leaving the lobby of his own building when the second plane struck. All the 500 employees under McAlinden's purview survived, something for which he partly credits geographic dispersal.

The portfolios under Morgan Stanley's care haven't done particularly well since Sept. 11. At the end of the June quarter, about 61 percent of the $39.6 billion handled by Morgan Stanley Asset Management were in funds ranked in the bottom half of their categories, noted The Wall Street Journal. Only 6 percent of Morgan Stanley's managed assets were in funds among the top fifth of their peer groups.

He started with W.E. Burnet & Co. more than three decades ago as a junior trader and later was promoted to research analyst. Argus Research in 1969 hired McAlinden as an analyst and within four years, he was the company's director of research; in 1980, he was named president and CEO. Investment bank Dillon Read recruited McAlinden in 1986 to establish and manage its research department. He later became a managing director and the firm's market strategist with his appointment as chief investment officer and chairman of the Investment Review Committee.

Chung assumed his current position after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks killed 35 of the 40 employees assigned to the World Trade Center, including star manager David Alger. After working as a tax lawyer following his 1987 graduation from Harvard Law School, Chung joined Alger and gradually went from researcher to senior analyst, focusing on Internet and network infrastructure companies.

The story of how company founder and namesake Fred Alger returned to rebuild his company has been widely reported over the past few months. Several former portfolio managers were persuaded to come back to the company, which was known for producing successful stock pickers.

However, those returning investment specialists haven't been able to stop most of Alger's equity funds from falling even further than their growth-oriented peers recently. Year-to-date through Aug. 31, four of Alger's five equity funds posted larger declines than the averages in their respective categories, according to Morningstar. From last September through July, assets in Alger funds fell by $800 million, with about one-third of that decline coming from withdrawals, according to a recent article in Kiplinger's Personal Finance.