Off-the-Wall Q&A

In this installment of my Friday Q&A series, I'm taking on your "off-the-wall" questions. I tried to select the most interesting ones that were at least tangentially related to investing and the stock market. That said, read on!

Question: It's great to see you posting more often! How did you get started writing for RealMoney?

-- M.G.

Answer: I made a blind submission of a column panning Xerox (XRX - commentary - Cramer's Take), which was then trading at about $25 per share, during the summer of 2000. The then-editor liked my writing style, or so he told me later, but he didn't know who I was, so he set the column aside. There it sat on his desk, until Xerox collapsed a few months later to around $10. Then this editor contacted me and said, "Great call, but now you need to rewrite it" (because the piece was dated, written before the collapse). So I did, and that was my first column for RealMoney.

Question: Which writer for RealMoney (besides yourself) would you give half of your money to run?

-- J.K.

Answer: Ha! I'm not going to answer that question. I've met most of the contributors and all of the editors, and I like every person in the group. That said, if I were to hand over half of my capital, I wouldn't necessarily look for someone whose approach overlaps with mine. And I wouldn't be looking for recent strong performance, either. If anything, I might seek out a money manager who's cold, not hot.

I recall speaking to an investor several months ago when he was getting ready to pull money from Bob Olstein and Ken Fisher, just because they hadn't performed well for a few months. I told him I thought that was a mistake. If you find money managers with whom you're comfortable, and you're convinced that they know what they're doing, stick with them. If you're a believer in cycles and reversion to the mean, as I am, the best time to invest with talented managers like Olstein and Fisher is when they're struggling, not when they're hot.

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Arne Alsin is the founder and principal of Alsin Capital Management, an Oregon-based investment advisor and portfolio manager of The Turnaround Fund, a no-load mutual fund. At time of publication, Alsin and/or ACM was long Schering-Plough and Humana, although holdings can change at any time. Under no circumstances does the information in this column represent a recommendation to buy or sell stocks. Alsin appreciates your feedback and invites you to send it to [e-mail]. Click here to receive Arne's latest favorite stock picks from his newsletter, The Turnaround Report.