For those who are interested, what follows is a brief biography of Bill Berger the multi-millionaire founder of the Berger Funds who died in 1999. I meet Mr. Berger in San Francisco in 1994. As I always do when I meet such people, I asked him what I should read. He, like James Dines, recommended Charles Mackay's book, Extraordinary Popluar Delsions and the Madness of Crowds. I remember another member of the crowd asking him in which direction he thought interest rates were going. His response: "Who cares?" What a great response!

Remember, all, as Derek Jeter says about the game of baseball..."It's a game of adjustments." So is it with life, investments, anything. He who can make an adjustment before the others, an adjustment to his thinking, to his reasoning to how he interprets the same data everyone else seems on the surface to be getting, will win again and again and again.

Focus on what you can know, not what you cannot know. And if you can know it, really know it. Believe it. Is it possible that everyone else in the world is nuts and you are not? Yes.

As a portfolio manager, Mr. Berger specialized in buying the stocks of small, fast-growing companies in which profits were rising at a faster pace than that of the overall market. But a big part of his skill was knowing when to sell as well, watching for signs that growth was slowing or the outlook for a particular business was dimming.

In that vein, Mr. Berger demonstrated his prowess well in 1994 when he sold Berger Associates, which managed the Berger Funds, to Kansas City Southern Industries, the railroad and financial-services company. The $47 million sale was completed just before the small growth stocks that Mr. Berger favored went out of fashion, resulting in a performance downturn for many of the Berger funds.

Mr. Berger's influence was felt across the major mutual fund companies based in Denver. In 1960 he started the Centennial Fund and in 1963 he began the Gryphon Fund. The two funds later merged and are now part of the Founders Growth Fund, managed by the Denver-based Founders Funds family.

In 1963, he became a vice president and portfolio manager for the Financial Programs asset-management company, which later evolved into the Invesco Funds family of mutual funds. Invesco is now part of Amvescap P.L.C., a global money manager.

In 1974 Mr. Berger founded Berger Associates to manage two portfolios, the Berger 100 fund, which invested in small companies, and the Berger 101 fund, which was named for a tax maneuver that is now obsolete. As portfolio manager, Mr. Berger led the Berger 100 fund to a gain of more than 88 percent in 1991, putting it among the top five diversified mutual funds in the country.