Eaton Vance's Richardson Likes the Market, Not 'Four-Letter' Stocks

It's funny to me that people talk now about the benefits of a fund that has losses. The only way it's a benefit is if you have a fund manager who knows enough to take advantage of them and capture them so they can stay tax-efficient down the road. The reality is lots of managers don't have the systems of don't have the motivation to achieve a solid after-tax return. Of course, the Tax-Managed Growth fund does have a mission of maximizing after-tax returns with a reasonable risk profile.

That certainly shows up in your expense ratio. It's 0.47%, that's almost index-fund territory.

Yeah, we're a Lipper Leader for expenses and for tax-efficiency as well.

We actually find lots of folks like the fund for the pretax returns and risk profile that it offers. Controlling the amount investors pay over to Uncle Sam is kind of the icing on the cake for shareholders.

2. The war is over, but geopolitical risks still hang over this market. How do you factor them into your investment strategy?

That's on everyone's mind. Here's where I come down on the effect of war and geopolitical factors on the market. In this day and age, the good and the bad news -- and for war it's mostly bad because it's an ugly thing -- reaches us immediately. It's such an unusual war. I don't know if it was shortened by that fact, but certainly the development of technological weaponry accelerated the war and minimized the casualties. Viewing the war in real-time would lend itself to a shorter conflict because the general population probably couldn't stand the strain of the war.

We have this immediate access to news around the world, whether it be the SARS outbreak, further disruption in the Middle East, terrorist events anywhere in the world -- we'll all know about them and right away. To that extent, these events get pretty quickly incorporated into market prices. That's going to continue to happen.