Diamond Hill's long-short strategy differs from similar strategies in a couple of key ways. It intentionally has a long bias and doesn't use the shorts as a hedge of long positions. More importantly, the managers keep their long-term investment perspective and stick to the core of their philosophy – estimating the intrinsic value of businesses and looking for opportunities to buy below that estimated value or short above it.

The Third Avenue Real Estate Value Fund is not a typical real estate portfolio. It seeks value and long-term capital appreciation outside the conventional way of simply investing in REITs. As long as the investments remain safe and cheap, portfolio manager Michael Winer would seek value in any property type or geographic location.

At Summit Investment Partners, the Everest portfolio team finds value in large cap, primarily domestic, stocks. Contrary to popular belief, the market at times is inefficient in pricing large cap stocks. This is the kind of opportunity which the fund seeks to profit from. The portfolio manager James McGlynn keeps a close tab on more than 400 stocks and follows a quantitative discipline to buy and sell stocks in the fund.

Risk taking is a way of life for high yield bond managers who operate at the least secure part of the market. John Addeo manages the MFS High Yield Opportunities fund with the understanding that bond investors usually don't have the chance to find home runs that offset mistakes. The fund's way of outperformance is avoiding mistakes through diversification, bottom-up credit selection, and rigorous research effort.

Flexible, concentrated and disciplined are the unique features of the Yacktman Focused Fund, according to manager Donald Yacktman. As implied by the name, the fund focuses only on its best ideas because overdiversification can be an excuse for ignorance. The crucial part of this strategy is to invest in solid businesses that sell at prices below their worth and to know the investments thoroughly.

Nick Calamos, manager of Calamos International Growth Fund, believes that if you manage risk properly, the returns will take care of themselves. And there are plenty of risks in the international growth space, from macroeconomic policy risks to accounting or company-specific risks. That's why the fund sticks to a cash flow perspective and to investing in high-return businesses able to sustain market and credit cycles.

Henderson Global Investors is well-known internationally but less so in the U.S. Its International Opportunities fund is set to bring the company's expertise in world markets to US investors. With a multi-manager structure, the fund has five teams that focus on specific geographic area or sector and gives them as much freedom as possible in their approach and decision-making. Ultimately, it is the stock picking that matters.