-Caveat Lector- from: http://aol.smartmoney.com:81/smt/candidates/ Click Here: <A HREF="http://aol.smartmoney.com:81/smt/candidates/">SmartMoney Today: Presidential Portfolios</A> ----- SmartMoney Today: Presidential Portfolios By Joe Hagan AS THE CAMPAIGN for the 2000 presidential election gets underway and the nation considers which man or woman will lead the nation into the 21st century, SmartMoney.com asks some weighty questions: Is a stock portfolio a window to the soul? Can a mutual fund pick tell us something about character? If so, then God help us all. What, for example, are we to make of the investing style of Vice President Al Gore, the leading Democratic contender? The veep owns not a single stock (or mutual fund, for that matter). Nothing, nada, zip. The self-described "creator of the Internet" doesn't even own an Internet stock. Does this constitute a "wooden" investor? Meanwhile, the challenger for the Democratic nomination, Bill Bradley, is heavily invested in a Silicon Valley venture fund that is set to spin off Internet IPOs left and right. Bradley, by the way, siphoned twice as much campaign money from Silicon Valley as Gore did. What's at the heart of a candidate's financial dreams? For Steve Forbes, it's Latin American telecom plays. For Pat Buchanan, bonds and precious metals. And so SmartMoney.com presents the Presidential Portfolios, the virtual holdings of the leading aspirants to the Oval Office. (Note: These are only rough estimates of the candidates' respective portfolios as revealed in their 1998 personal financial disclosures submitted to the Federal Election Commission. Because those filings are incomplete in some ways and vague in others, we've made all sorts of assumptions and estimates in order to produce these portfolios. For the rules of the chase, please check our disclaimer.) Peering at other people's holdings is, of course, financial voyeurism of the highest order. But in the case of the presidential candidates, there's some seriousness to the exercise. After all, for politicians even more than for the rest of us, talk is cheap; money is the real deal, and how the candidates invest it speaks volumes about their appetites for risk, their values, their expectations -- and especially their visions of where the U.S. and world economies are headed. As David Feldman, a financial planner in Parsippany, N.J., says of Gore's stocklessness: "I'd ask him where his support of the American financial system and the investment community is. Where are his long-term expectations for the American economy if he's not a participant in American stocks, bonds and mutual funds?" At the opposite end of the spectrum from Gore is the prospect of a candidate who might be just a little too interested in the connection between his investments and his politics. The FEC filings were instituted back in 1975 as part of the post-Watergate push for clean government that also brought us the independent-counsel law. Among the current roster of candidates, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R., Utah) raised some eyebrows for our planners. Hatch, a member of the Senate Finance Committee, owns $100,000-plus in financial stocks. "If I was in government and I owned all that bank stock," says Dee Lee, a certified financial planner in Harvard, Mass., "I'd be a bit biased." While the incumbent residents of the White House, President Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton, are said to be the most impecunious presidential couple since the Carters, the contenders to succeed them are all pretty well-off folks. The richest of them, of course, is Steve Forbes, whose holdings in the family candy store that publishes Forbes magazine bring his net worth to a reported $400 million. His investment portfolio holds somewhere around $7 million in stock and $800,000 in mutual funds. And he's a savvy stock picker: At the end of last year, Forbes had $300,000-plus in Telef onos de Mexico (TMX), which has risen more than 110% in the last year. The least affluent contender outside of Gore seems to be Gary Bauer, whose assets, at a maximum of $1.8 million, do not include any real property, according to FEC filings. The worst stock pick on the list? Bauer's holdings in Secure Computing (SCUR), which have plummeted over 60% so far this year. To help us judge the candidates' investment acumen, we asked three certified financial planners -- San Francisco-based David Yeske, David Feldman and Dee Lee, author of "Let's Talk Money" -- to review these portfolios (we didn't tell them whose portfolios they were looking at until after they made their assessments). For a look at how all the candidates stack up against each other -- and against the S&P 500 index -- just click on the chart above. To see the individual portfolios, click on the candidate buttons. We've set up these portfolios to track performance year-to-date, and the performance figures and rankings will be updated frequently during each business day. GARY BAUER BILL BRADLEY PAT BUCHANAN GEORGE W. BUSH STEVE FORBES AL GORE ORRIN HATCH JOHN MCCAIN DISCLAIMER: These portfolios are only rough estimates of each candidate's holdings. The FEC filings show income and assets only in broad ranges -- for example, $1,001-$15,000; $500,000-$1,000,000. We added up the stock and fund assets of the entire filing, including those of spouses and dependents, taking the midpoint of each range and using the price per share as of Dec. 31, 1998 to derive a year-to-date return. So when we refer to John McCain's return, for example, we mean the investment performance of the sum total of publicly traded investments of the McCain household, calculated since Dec. 31, 1998. Note, too, that as governor of Texas, George W. Bush has at least $15,000,000 in an untrackable blind trust, so his holdings are not fully represented. Lastly, the FEC filing of Alan Keyes is not available to the public as of yet. We'll post his virtual portfolio as soon as it becomes available. The Personal Financial Disclosures are available for public viewing on the Web site of the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit organization in Washington, D.C. Home | Contact Us | Help | Search | Symbol Lookup | Five-Day Archive| User Profile SmartMoney.com © 1999 SmartMoney. SmartMoney is a joint publishing venture of Dow Jones & Company, Inc.and Hearst Communications, Inc. All Rights Reserved. All quotes delayed by 20 minutes. Delayed quotes provided by S&P Comstock. Historical prices and fundamental data provided by Media General Financial Services. Earnings estimates provided by Zacks Investment Research. Insider trading data provided by Thomson Financial Services. ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. 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