"You'll never get that upward move," said Ralph Wanger, who has been managing the Acorn Fund since it was started 25 years ago.

Its members include some of the top-performing groups in the business - Mutual Shares, Lindner Management, Benham Management and the Acorn Fund.

His $4 billion Acorn Fund has low annual turnover - about 30 percent.

It was last April, and Mr. Wanger, the manager of the $2 billion Acorn Fund, was faced with writing a report to shareholders.

Morningstar has prepared a list of clones for prominent closed funds, except for two that they consider without reasonable facsimiles: Acorn Fund and FPA Paramount.

And there are money managers like Ralph Wanger of the Acorn Fund, who relied too much on Mr. Adler and ignored the other people involved.

The Acorn Fund began investing abroad in 1985 and now has a 20 percent position in small foreign stocks.

Among them, Ralph Wanger, who manages the Acorn Fund (up 18.7 percent a year, on average, over 10 years), is modest about his status as the industry's court jester.

The Acorn Fund, with about 20 percent of its assets in emerging markets, lost 7.5 percent last year, compared with a 0.3 percent loss for all small company funds.

He went to the Acorn Fund in early 1989.