In common with other countries in the central and southern region of Eur-ope, there isn't a great deal of choice within the Greek domestic mutual fund industry. In Greece, the fiscal stimulus has mostly been in favour of money market and fixed interest funds, although with the impressive rises re-cently seen in the Athens Index, boosted by a developing privatisation programme, there has been growing interest in equity funds.

For institutions wanting to gain some exposure to Greece, the best op-portunities are offshore. Us-ing Forsyth Partners' Em-erging Europe review as a guide, those regional offshore funds with the highest weighting in Greece include Aberdeen Prolific's Frontier Markets Fund (13.3%), Baring Eastern Europe (17.5%), Fleming Emerging Europe (21%), Credit Lyonnais European Emerging Equity (23%), Morgan Grenfell European Emerging Markets (30%) and State Street Eur-ope Emergente (20%).

Valerie Bureau of Credit Lyonnais favours southern European markets as they present less risk than the markets of eastern Europe. And despite the Greek market's rise recently, she feels that it continues to be a EU convergence play, as real interest rates remain high and there is scope for them to fall over the long term. Indeed the falling interest rate trend has en-couraged other regional specialists to significantly in-crease their Greek weightings. Christopher Turner at Morgan Grenfell has boosted his portfolio of Greek stocks from 18% to 30% since January in response to this interest rate scenario.

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