Today in the WSJ, everyone learned who the winners of the Lipper Fund awards were, but not the details of the soiree high above Central Park where they were given away.

The soiree held at the Mandarian Oriental hotel at Columbus Circle boasted a who's who of the fund world. The event was co-sponsored by competing newswires Reuters and The WSJ which is an odd fact in itself. Absent as a sponsor was Ignites -- they had been a sponsor in prior years, but an source with knowledge of the company confided that Investment News was not comfortable with having them as a co-sponsor. Of course, Ignites' absence could have something to do with the fact that the WSJ has much deeper pockets.

The WSJ's Suzann Redding took advantage of the podium to expound on the many virtues her paper had to offer before getting to the presentations. To see who won, buy the paper which includes a recap of the awards in a special advertising section. A quick flip through the section will also reveal that the WSJ has most likely recouped their event expenditures -- Calvert, Goldman Sachs, TransAmerica, Fidelity, JennisonDryden, Dreyfus, Columbia are all winners running ads in the insert. (Even in the Fund Awards special section, funds could not escape their ETF rivals as Powershares purchased the sections full back page).

Lipper went with a non-traditional approach to order the presentation, the awards were presented alphabetically by the names of the winners, that way anybody who can spell was anticipating their moment in the spotlight. The big winners of the best fund families for 2007 can be found in Investment News.

Some other interesting tidbits from the night are: the winner of the Mixed Assets Group Small, TransAmerica IDEX is allied with Morningstar, rival of Lipper, its good to know the folks at Lipper keep an open mind about these sort of things. 

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