Growth not all bad. (Investments & Finance).

If you ask Bob Turner, now is no time to give up on growth-stock investing.

We'd expect Turner to say that, speaking as chairman and chief investment officer of a firm that specializes in the growth style of money management.

He deserves a hearing anyway. It proved wise to keep listening to bargain-hunting value managers a couple of years ago when their style was in disfavor. So let's do likewise nowadays for respected growth managers like Turner Investment Partners Inc. while they're on the outs. "You get this pattern of extremes," Turner said. "Now everybody wants to beat up on the growth stocks."

Who could blame investors for being frustrated? A measure of relatively high-priced growth stocks, the Standard & Poor's Barra Growth Index, has taken a 31 percent dive over the last 24 months, while its value counterpart declined by just half a percentage point.

After the growth-stock mania of the late 1990s, this merely brought the long-term results of the two indexes back close to parity. Try telling that, though, to anybody who clambered aboard the growth bandwagon just before the music stopped. From the end of February 2000 through the end of February 2002, my Bloomberg shows that a stalwart of Turner's mutual-fund stable, the Turner Midcap Growth Fund, fell 54 percent.

Yet the $756 million fund's five-year return remains an imposing 19.8 percent a year, good enough to rank in the top i percent of all funds. Though the bear market has shrunk Turner Investment Partners' total assets under management to about $9 billion from about $13 billion at the peak in the spring of 2000, the firm attracted $2.2 billion in inflows from investors last year.

Turner says better market conditions this year ought to help reward that faith. "Growth investing isn't pure technology" he said. "There are growth opportunities companies that can beat earnings expectations, in every sector of the market."

Don't higher than usual valuation measures such as price earnings ratios scare him? No, he says -- they are justified by low interest rates, which increase the relative appeal to investors of each dollar of prospective future dividends on stocks.

Turner argues that investors, once too high on the Internet's prospects, now err as badly on the negative side. 'Although Internet companies have been struggling (and will go on struggling), the Internet itself continues to grow in importance, size size and value," Turner's firm says in recently published paper. "We think the future is brightest for business e-commerce, which should be instrumental in boosting companies' competitiveness and the nation's economic growth throughout this decade,"