(FORTUNE Magazine) – It's 5 a.m. in San Francisco. Maurice Werdegar is at his computer screen, can of V-8 in hand. He leans over, exposing his balding pate to a digital camera and what, for all he knows, could be thousands of people watching his every move over the Net.

Thus begins another Truman Show-like day at the mutual fund for investors who really want to keep an eye on things: MetaMarkets.com's OpenFund. "At first, friends would log on trying to catch me in some bad gesture," the 35-year-old head trader recalls. "Now it's just part of the fabric of life here."

OpenFund is not, of course, the first fund to use gimmickry to stand out in the marketplace. At least its heart is in the right place. Most funds are loath to tell shareholders how managers are investing at any moment, and the industry has resisted attempts to require funds to report holdings to the SEC more than twice a year. OpenFund, by contrast, has no secrets whatsoever. The brainchild of Barclays Global Mutual Funds' former CEO Donald Luskin and chief strategist Dave Nadig, OpenFund tells anybody who logs on what it has bought, sold, or shorted; how much it paid; and why.

That might be valuable knowledge. OpenFund surged 89% in the last quarter of '99 to place first in its category. Who knows? Maybe it helps to have shareholders look over the trader's shoulder.

--Margaret Boitano