Tsai Steps Down

The alchemists of the mid-1960s were the managers of the highly speculative go-go mutual funds, which leaped in value during those racy days. There was no more celebrated stock picker than Shanghai-born, Boston-educated Gerald Tsai Jr., who pondered the charts, played his hunches and took long shots--many of which paid off. Time and the market have not been kind to Tsai. Last week, after several losing years, he quit as president of Tsai Management & Research Corp., which he founded in 1965.

Tsai began generating attention in the early '60s by his success as a quick in-and-out stock trader and portfolio manager with Boston's Fidelity group of funds. He went to New York City to start Tsai Management and the Manhattan Fund. The fund was virtually an overnight success. The initial offering was planned for $25 million, but was so greatly oversubscribed that $247 million in shares were sold. Two years later, the CNA Financial Corp. (formerly Continental National American Corp.), a financial-insurance-housing conglomerate, agreed to buy out Tsai Management--88% owned by Tsai and his family--for some $20 million in stock, keeping the founder on as president.

Almost immediately, the market began to plunge, and Tsai's portfolios did worse than more conservative funds. He took a drubbing on such unfortunate investments as National Student Marketing, Parvin-Dohrmann and Four Seasons Nursing Centers of America, Inc. Anyone who bought 100 shares of Manhattan Fund for $1,000 at its 1966 offering would have been left with about half that last week, not counting dividends. Tsai was to some extent merely unlucky, but he was also unwise to use his freewheeling investment strategies in the uncertain market of the past few years.

CNA directors were prepared to keep Tsai on almost indefinitely, but he left because he has been unable to capture the presidency of the $1.6 billion conglomerate, ,a job he coveted. Now Tsai has bought control of Knight, Carry, Bliss & Co., Inc., a medium-sized brokerage firm that specializes in institutional business. "The brokerage business has gone through an unsettling period," Tsai says, "but my impression is that the clouds seem to have lifted. I am interested in concentrating on a limited number of high-quality growth stocks, and I feel very excited about the whole thing." That sounds like an older and wiser Gerry Tsai.

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