10 Questions with Battered Tech Pro Matthew Fitzmaurice

Most folks wouldn't touch the dot-coms with rubber gloves on, but Matthew Fitzmaurice and his colleagues at Amerindo Investors keep right on stuffing them in their funds.

Fitzmaurice is chief executive of New York-based Amerindo Investment Advisors, a boutique firm that has focused strictly on emerging tech companies since 1980. Amerindo launched the (ATCHX Quote)Amerindo Technology fund in 1996; since then it's earned a reputation as perhaps the riskiest tech fund out there. It gained 249% in 1999 but is about to fall more than 50% for the second-straight calendar year. The firm's (BTBAX Quote)Internet B2B fund, which was launched last year to zero in on the business-to-business corner of the Net, is down more than 50% this year, too.

It would be easy to write off Net stocks and the funds that love them. But both have come alive of late. Amerindo's Tech fund is up more than 40% over the past 90 days, compared with an 11% gain for the S&P 500. Are the surviving Net stocks going to take off? Which are Amerindo buying? And does anybody really need a Net fund anyway, let alone a B2B Net fund? Read on. ...