(2002-03-06) f

James Grant thinks stocks are overvalued. Fifty years ago, the business of professional money management hardly existed. According to Federal Reserve data, American individuals owned 97 percent of their shares outright. Today, they directly hold a little less than half. The proportion of investment decisions made by Mutual Funds, pension funds and the like has drastically increased... Are stocks overvalued? In professional circles, the question is not so much inadmissable as it is irrelevant. On Wall Street, simply avoiding loss is not success. What makes a career in a time like this is losing a little less than the competition... Alfred Harrison, vice chairman of Alliance Capital Management and manager of the $11 billion Alliance Premier Growth Fund, spoke for many when he confessed in December that "nobody really dug into footnotes" of the Enron financial statements. Mr. Harrison's firm, as of Sept. 30, owned 43 million Enron shares, which raises a question. If a 43-million share investment wasn't enough to command the attention of our leading fiduciaries, what would have been?