(MONEY Magazine) – Beth Terrana is on her third fund at Fidelity, and she's batting three for three. At Fidelity Growth & Income, from 1985 to 1990, she produced a 15.7% annualized return, vs. 11.9% for the S&P 500. At Fidelity Equity-Income, from 1990 through 1993, she beat the average equity income fund by more than 10 percentage points annually. And at the $12.4 billion Fidelity Fund, her perch since late 1993, she has surpassed her peers four out of the past five years.

Terrana, 41, doesn't fit the Fidelity mold. She didn't come from a wealthy suburb, track stocks as a teenager or attend an Ivy League college. Terrana hails from Brooklyn, N.Y.; her dad was a Ford dealer. She studied history, then business, at the State University of New York at Binghamton.

But what Terrana lacked in white-shoe credentials she more than made up for in drive. She talked her way into Morgan Guaranty Trust, then into Harvard Business School (where "my grades weren't so great"), then into Fidelity in 1983 as a retailing analyst. Her persistence and attention to detail so impressed the Fidelity bigwigs that they gave her the Growth & Income Fund to run upon its launch, just 2 1/2 years after she arrived.

Like all good managers, Terrana thinks a great deal about how she thinks. "I'm very bad at analyzing 'fast industries' where I have to identify rapid change in advance," she says in her chewy Brooklyn accent. "I like companies in the midst of gradual change." So Terrana is light on tech stocks, preferring retailers like Wal-Mart, Dayton Hudson and Home Depot, as well as media giants like Time Warner (MONEY's parent), CBS and Comcast. "Over time my goal is to beat the market," she says, "but in a really bullish market I won't participate fully. Hopefully, in a bear market, I won't go down as much."

--J.Z.