10 Questions With Strong American Utilities' Bill Reaves and Mark Luftig

If you fell asleep when the Nasdaq hit 5000, woke up today to find it under 3000 and heard everyone talking about utility stocks, you'd probably think you were having a nightmare.

Well, Rip, pinch yourself, because it's all true. Obviously the focus is on California's power debacle -- Silicon Valley types carrying oil lamps to work makes great copy -- but there's a bigger issue. Over the past few years we haven't been building many power plants, but now it looks like this digital economy of ours is sucking up more power than we expected. Now we need more and higher-quality power. But it takes years to build new power plants. So thanks to deregulation, the utilities sector could be an intriguing area as shops sell each other power and compete for one another's customers.

Managers: Bill Reaves and Mark Luftig

Fund: (SAMUX Quote)Strong American Utilities Fund

Managed since: July 1993 (inception)

Assets: $27 billion

3-year annualized return/ranking vs. peers: 13.8%/Beats 66% of peers

Expense ratio/avg. utilities fund expenses: 1%/1.43%

Top three holdings: Dominion Resources(D Quote) FirstEnergy(FE Quote) Teco Energy(TE Quote)

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