How can a successful money manager be so counterintuitive? For one thing, he's got time on his side. His portfolio has a three-to-five-year time horizon, and he doesn't want to own stocks unless he thinks they'll double over that five years. If he thinks he's made a mistake (say, when he bought insurance company Conseco), he usually hopes to dump it within a year.

Kleinschmidt also prefers dealing with high-net-worth investors, whom he thinks are less concerned with style boxes and more willing to enjoy the ride. The goal is more about capital preservation, he says, rather than hitting the balls out of the park and beating the market in the best of times.

"When you're a well-experienced investor, you've seen so many things come down the pike that represent the new and better way to make money and they all fall on their face ... as hedge funds are falling on their faces right now. And when you see that enough, unless you're not paying attention, you become very skeptical of the consensus viewpoint."

Kleinschmidt, a father of four (including a 28-year-old and a 5-year-old) hails from Oshkosh, Wis., a town known for its kids clothes and squeezed between Lakes Winnebago and Butte des Morts, a good launching pad for this bass fisherman-cum-fly fisherman and part-time Green Bay Packers fan. After attending the University of Wisconsin, he migrated east in the early '70s to college in Massachusetts, and eventually headed to New York City to work toward a Ph.D. in economics at Columbia, though he didn't finish the dissertation.

"I'd like to tell people I didn't finish my dissertation," he says. "But the truth is I didn't start my dissertation."

In the meantime, he taught at a few institutions, including  Marymount Manhattan College. He even taught graduate students at Adelphi University on morning commuter trains, hustling up to 125th Street some mornings to catch the outbound commuter railroad when it was still pitch black outside-in the 1970s.

"I would have my own train car and have a blackboard and a podium and a microphone and teach economics for an hour on the train," he says. But a career in academia was not in the offing. He was too poor to live on a teacher's salary in New York. "The other thing I can say about my academic career is that at the end of the day, professors were not exactly the babe magnet that I hoped they would be," he joked.

And he was humbled after encountering some of the geniuses in his graduate math courses. "I learned that there is a yawning gap between smart and 'math smart,'" he says. "These guys could hold multi-step proofs in their heads along from the beginning to the end, and I couldn't do that. ... So that and the lack of money helped me reach the decision to go down to Wall Street," where, he can't resist adding, "you didn't have to be so smart."

After cutting his teeth at institutional money manager David J. Greene & Co. for 13 years, he went to Tocqueville in 1991.

Among the bigger successes his team has scored was in the early 2000s, when the fund began making its metal and mining plays, in particular Phelps Dodge Corp., Newmont Mining, International Nickel, and Teck Corp. (now Teck Cominco Ltd.). These positions, most of which he has since divested, were great choices, he says, because capital constraints in this industry had kept a conservative generation of managers from starting a rapid wave of new projects (taking lessons from those in the past whose heads had rolled for being overachievers), and when the demand started to go through its cyclical upswing in the 2000s, the supply was lacking, and prices rose.