pretax return

He also looks for companies whose pretax return on assets is at least 10 percent over the last three to five years.

He is likely to achieve another goal, a 25 percent pretax return on equity.

It also reported a pretax return on partners' capital that exceeded 60 percent in its best years.

Then the fund's after-tax performance would approach its pretax returns.

Mr. Schofield projects a pretax return of about 12 percent.

And to the managers, whose compensation often depends on pretax return, taxes may seem unimportant.

Historically, pretax returns are between 5 and 8 percent, and the capital needs keep rising.

In its best years, including this year's first half, Goldman has generated a pretax return on partners' capital that exceeds 60 percent.

But the pretax return on foreign direct investment has averaged only about 4 percent a year since 1982, and did not rise in the last three years.

(Counting management fees, the actual pretax return to investors is closer to 25 percent.)

The chief executive, Josef Ackermann, said the group was "making good progress" toward a 25 percent pretax return on equity for 2005.

Generally, they generate fewer taxable gains for their investors than do funds that trade more often but generate the same pretax return.

Mr. Hahn has sought to cut Volkswagen's annual costs by $600 million, with the goal of an 8 percent pretax return on profits.

Despite last year's record earnings of $630 million, Volkswagen's pretax return was 5 percent, below his goal and the levels of most European auto makers.

OF course, some tax-managed funds have enviable pretax returns, and their tax efficiency may again distinguish them from their peers in five years or so.

Mutual funds will have to decide whether to lend their shares, a move that would bolster pretax returns but hurt aftertax returns.

According to Stanger's assessment, JMB has an average annual pretax return on all its partnerships through 1986 of 13.2 percent.

The goal of all-weather funds is to generate pretax returns of about 8 percent to 10 percent a year, regardless of the stock market's performance.

Nor were any managers' reputations suffering because their shareholders' after-tax returns were so much lower than their pretax returns.

Though your pretax returns will likely be lower, my research indicates that your after-tax returns will most likely be greater.

Instead of spending time trying to figure which funds are most tax efficient, investors should look for funds that are more likely to deliver high pretax returns, the newsletter advises.

To put that into perspective, Big Board member firms that deal with the public, a group that excludes specialists, posted a pretax return of 4.8 percent, according to Lipper.

The lesson: because many sources of investment information - mutual-fund ads, for example - use pretax returns, only by crunching their own after-tax numbers can people gauge investments' relative attractiveness.

Thus, if an industrial stock and a utility stock offered equal total pretax returns, but the industrial's return came chiefly from increases in its stock price, the old law favored the industrial.

That business, too, is said by analysts to produce 35 to 50 percent pretax returns, and Mellon's operation is almost as large as that of First Chicago, the cash-management leader.