NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Stick to bonds, Bill. That seemed to be what equity fund managers were telling bond fund manager William Gross in response to his scathing criticism of General Electric.

GE's stock took a big hit Wednesday after Gross, the influential manager of the PIMCO Total Return Fund, posted a commentary on PIMCO's Web site questioning GE's earnings growth and the health of its balance sheet. (For more about Gross's comments, click here.)

The stock fell 2.8 percent on Wednesday and dropped another 3.5 percent on Thursday. Noel DeDora, manager of the Fremont New Era Value Fund, says he thought individual investors, as opposed to institutions, were doing most of the selling.

GE is the largest holding in Fremont New Era Value, accounting for 13.9 percent of the fund's assets as of Jan. 31. DeDora says his fund has not sold any GE in response to Gross's comments, and he strongly disagreed with Gross's contention that GE's aggressive acquisition strategy is a potential problem.

In his column, Gross said GE "grows earnings not so much by the brilliance of management or the diversity of their operations...but through the acquisition of companies." (Interestingly enough, Gross is the subadvisor for Fremont's bond fund.)

DeDora says GE (GE: Research, Estimates) hasn't had a reputation of overpaying, so aggressive buying is not a problem. "If you can buy companies cheaply enough, it's not an awful thing to do. But right now, anything that isn't just straight organic growth is being questioned because of Enron," he says.

Other followers of the stock dismissed Gross's report as well. For example, one of Gross's major concerns was that GE has a large amount of commercial paper, short-term debt issued by a company, outstanding. As of Dec. 31, GE had issued $117.5 billion in commercial paper, most from its GE Capital financial unit.

But Tom Mahowald, director of equity research for American Express Financial Advisors, says that commercial paper as a percentage of total borrowings has held steady at about 50 percent since 1998. So the fact that GE has a lot of short-term debt isn't exactly news -- nor a problem. And after the market closed on Thursday, GE issued a press release saying that it intends to lower its commercial paper to a range of 25 to 35 percent of debt.

American Express's AXP New Dimensions Fund has a big bet on GE. As of Dec. 31, the stock accounted for 3.4 percent of total net assets, making it the fund's third largest holding. Mahowald says Gross's report does not change his opinion of the stock, and in fact, he thinks the drop to about $37 a share makes it a better value.

Mahowald says as the economy continues to recover, portions of GE's diverse businesses that are cyclical, such as the NBC television unit, will rebound.

Gross, meanwhile, maintained that GE needs to be more upfront about its acquisitions and how they impact earnings. In an e-mail exchange with CNN/Money, Gross continued to express concern about GE's ability to sustain a healthy growth rate, writing that, with or without acquisitions, a company the size of GE cannot keep growing at a 15 percent clip.

Curiously, the one group that you would expect to staunchly defend GE was eerily quiet: Wall Street analysts. GE continues to be the stock that can do no wrong in the eyes of the sell side. All 15 analysts following the company have it rated at least a buy. Nine of them have it rated a strong buy. But none of the analysts following GE returned calls seeking comment and there were no research notes released about the issues raised in Gross's commentary.

One short seller who has been skeptical of GE in the past said the negative press stemming from the Enron mess (most Wall Street analysts maintained buy ratings on the stock up until its bankruptcy filing) has made analysts less willing to aggressively pound the table on a stock without doing their homework.

"Analysts are a little bit nervous about defending something they don't know how to defend. They don't carry the pom-poms to work anymore," says William Fleckenstein, president of Fleckenstein Capital, a Seattle based money management firm that engages in short selling.