The Intel-Capitalists

HIGH FINANCE

Fred Stein arrived on Wall Street in 1957. His assets: nine years in the merchant marine, two years in the Army, a high school equivalency diploma and a voracious appetite for reading. An Army buddy had introduced him to Gerald M. Loeb's Battle for Investment Survival, and Stein was hooked. He read every stock-market book that he could find, and landed a position as a $50-a-week clerk. Then he shifted from job to job in several Wall Street houses, always moving up.

Last week Stein, now 41, became chief executive of a new investment service that will advise affluent clients about how to make their money multiply. It is a revised version of the 35-year-old Standard & Poor's investment service, one of the five biggest in the nation. Called Standard & Poor's/InterCapital, Inc., the firm starts out with $3 billion in funds that have been put up by 1,800 individual and institutional investors, each of which must have accounts of at least $140,000.

Russel Morrison, the 37-year-old president of Standard & Poor's--a company that specializes in financial reporting--decided that the best way to improve profits of the S. & P. counseling oper-'ation was to spin it off as a separate firm under bolder management. He turned to Stein, then a partner at Oppenheimer & Co. Stein had earned a reputation as an analyst by his spotting of Syntex, Control Data and semiconductor stocks. Last year he earned more than $1,000,000. At InterCapital, Stein has three friends. The No. 2 man, Arthur Zeikel, 36, moved from Dreyfus Corp., where he was co-manager of the $2.7-billion Dreyfus Fund for the past four years. The two other partners in InterCapital, Charles C. Reilly, 38, and J. Brock Stokes, 33, were colleagues of Stein's at Oppenheimer.

Standard & Poor's retains a 40% interest in the firm. The remaining 60% is held by Stein and his associates, who signed personal checks for $1,800-000 in capital. In staffing Standard & Poor's/ InterCapital, Stein expects to emphasize youth, even to the point of hiring managers in their 20s. "Young men are more able to spot opportunities," says he. "They don't wear blinkers."

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