Products March 9, 2003

Bear Stearns Unveils Small- to Mid-Cap Equity Fund

September 27, 2001(PLANSPONSOR.com) - Bear Stearns Asset Management Inc. (BSAM) will launch an equity fund on October 1 that focuses on small-to mid-capitalization companies, Bear Stearns announced Thursday.

Reported by

Fred Schneyer

Managers of the new S&P STARS Opportunities Portfolio will primarily look for companies with caps of up to $7 billion and whose stock prices do not reflect anticipated earnings growth, the company said.

The BSAM portfolio management team will use S&P’s STARS ranking system as the foundation for stock selection.

Through an analytical process based on Standard & Poor’s highest-ranked 5-STARS stocks and Bear Stearns’ fundamental analysis, the new fund’s stock pickers will look for issues that can outperform the S&P MidCap 400 Index.

In order to take full advantage of market opportunities, the fund’s managers may also sell short stocks in the lowest ranked 1-STARS category.

The STARS Opportunities portfolio management team includes veteran Robert Natale, John Coyle, and John Massey.

The new fund is modeled after BSAM’s six-year old S&P STARS Portfolio, a large-cap core equity strategy, which attracted more than $2 billion in net inflows in 2000.