`GROWTH' INVESTOR NAMED TO LEAD FIDELITY MAGELLAN.

Byline: Leslie Eaton The New York Times

Robert E. Stansky is a man with a plan, and that is likely to mean big changes for investors in the nation's largest mutual fund, Fidelity Magellan.

Not that Stansky has a blueprint of what he will buy and sell for the $56 billion fund. ``I don't know what Magellan will look like,'' he said in an interview Thursday. That will depend on what investments appear attractive when he formally takes the reins on June 3, he said, adding, ``The market could be up 100 points or down 100 points - or 1,000.''

But Stansky does have a distinctive investing style. He is widely known as a methodical ``growth'' investor. In his view, unit-sales growth leads to revenue growth, revenue growth leads to earnings growth, and earnings growth leads to higher stock prices.

``That's my M.O.,'' said Stansky, 40, who has managed the Fidelity Growth Company Fund since 1987. And that will continue to be his modus operandi, he said, though running Magellan ``does broaden the possibilities a little.''

What that means for investors, analysts said, is that Magellan's performance is likely to be more predictable than it has been during the four-year tenure of Jeffrey Vinik, who said Thursday that he would be leaving FMR Corp.'s Fidelity family of funds to start his own money management firm.

Vinik has zigged and zagged across the investment landscape. Late last year, he made a big bet in bonds, a bet that has since dragged down the fund's returns. But earlier in 1995, he placed a similarly hefty wager on the stocks of technology companies - and that paid off brilliantly.

By contrast, under Stansky, the gauge of Magellan's performance should be clearer, analysts said: When growth stocks are in favor, Magellan should excel; when growth stocks are out of favor, the fund should lag.

``Stansky is not as much of a gunslinger as Vinik - he's steady and evenhanded, and true to his style,'' said Jack Bowers, editor of Fidelity Monitor, a newsletter that analyzes Fidelity funds.

Overall, Vinik made a name for himself by moving from sector to sector in the stock market, rather than by investigating companies from the ground up, meeting management, testing products and scrutinizing income statements and balance sheets.

The bottom-up approach was epitomized by Peter Lynch, the legendary manager of Magellan from 1977 to 1990, who was Stansky's mentor when he first came to Fidelity in 1983.

But Stansky's methodical approach does not mean that his investing will be safe or low-risk. Indeed, under Stansky, ``Magellan Fund will be more apt to outperform or underperform'' the stock market, said Stephen Savage, editor of the Value Line Mutual Fund Survey.

That is because growth investing, as a strategy, works better in some stock markets than in others. While over the long haul it has been a good way to make money, there have been periods when growth investors have lagged behind investors with a different approach, such as trying to buy cheap stocks.

For proof, look at Stansky's record managing Fidelity Growth Company. Under his management since April 1987, the fund has soared 293 percent, while a fund mimicking the Standard & Poor's index of 500 stocks has climbed about 200 percent. But in times of market turmoil, Growth Company fared far worse than the market as a whole. For example, in 1987, the year that included the October crash, Stansky's fund fell 1.7 percent, while the S&P 500 ended the year up 5.1 percent. And in 1994, a pretty rotten year for stocks, Growth Company lost 2.2 percent, while the market eked out a gain of 1.3 percent.

If Stansky follows that pattern at Magellan, he is bound to disappoint investors who expect that the fund will always ``beat the market.'' But analysts said it will probably appeal to the bulk of the investors already in Magellan - investors who may not worry about chasing after the hottest performance in the country, but who are puzzled and alarmed when their fund appears to be out of sync with the market.

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