Most fund managers define small-caps as companies with market capitalizations under $1 billion.

As a result, small-caps tend to rebound the most once this selling pressure evaporates.

Does the stumble in small-caps last quarter make the advisers nervous about the overall United States market?

And, he added, "if people really felt good about earnings they would be driving the mid-caps and small-caps higher."

"A lot of new money in the market has gone into mid-caps rather than small-caps because it's easier to put that money to use," he said.

"Small-caps had a pretty doggone good third quarter," he said, "and most likely, they're going to turn in a dynamite fourth quarter."

Small caps can be specified in CSS using "font-variant: small-caps;".

"They're hanging on by a finger," said Claudia Mott, a small-caps analyst at Prudential Securities.

She is staying with mid-cap stocks, she said, because they "have less volatility than small-caps but tend to do well when small-caps do well."

Relatively volatile equities like small-caps and international stocks should be held through mutual funds, rather than in individual stocks, Mr. Jaffe said, because of the diversification that funds provide.

"Small-caps tend to outperform at the beginning of a cycle," said Mr. Sah, 38, who took over sole management of the fund in December after working on a team that ran it for three years.

BODY WASHED UP NEAR SANDSEND, the small-caps headline ran.

This certainly needed to be checked, because companies that have contributed to the most candidates have tended to be among the largest, and large-cap stocks outperformed small-caps during many of the years that the professors studied.

It's also a profitable time to be an arb; Merger Fund, Mr. Green's mutual fund, is up more than 4 percent this year, while the Dow is slightly underwater and small-caps are in the red.

The difference in executive-compensation gains was sharper when stock options, restricted shares and long-term incentives were included: C.E.O. compensation surged by 19.2 percent at small-caps, 13.33 percent at mid-caps and 3.66 percent at the biggest companies.

Jeffrey Dunham, the president of Dunham & Associates Investment Counsel in San Diego, said his clients would probably move into "investment areas that have been out of favor - that includes growth stocks and health care as well as small-caps."