(FORTUNE Magazine) – The other day I was telling my younger daughter the fable about the tortoise and the hare. At the end she looked up and asked, "So if everyone knows the story, why does anyone think the rabbit will win?" Good question, kid. Kind of reminds me of all those fancy-Dan aggressive-growth funds. You know they're going to hit the wall. It's not if, but when. But maybe they need a little more focus on protecting your principal. Like a Hippocratic oath of investing: First, don't lose the money.

This little diatribe has everything to do with what is very much a mission-critical topic on Wall Street these days. It's a debate between investors who advocate relative-return strategies and those who favor absolute-return investing.

Let's start with the relative crowd. They are the folks who say that investors should always be looking for growth. Because over time stocks beat all other asset classes, and because growth stocks are the best-performing stocks, you should constantly be looking to invest in the next Amazon or Starbucks or Quest Diagnostics. Downturns? Bear markets? You ride 'em out; you'll catch up in the next bull run. In the meantime, you just want to do better than your benchmark--the average aggressive fund, the S&P 500, the Beardstown Ladies Club, whatever. You can always find some index to beat that makes you a winner, relatively speaking.

Investors seemed perfectly happy with these precepts during the bull market. But now a certain unease has taken hold. No wonder. Losing less than someone else doesn't feel like victory. It feels like losing money. So all of a sudden the tortoises of the investing world, the absolute-return gang, are starting to look pretty darned good.

Take a look, for instance, at John Calamos Sr., manager of the $722 million Calamos Market Neutral fund (CVSIX) in Naperville, Ill. Calamos's fund is one of only a handful--out of 8,435 domestic equity and balanced funds screened by Morningstar--that have produced positive returns for the past seven consecutive years. His five-year annualized return is 9.48%, vs.--2.89% for the S&P 500. It goes without saying that he accomplished this in a wild bull and a vicious bear market. "The basic concept is to be market neutral," Calamos says, "not correlated to the stock or the bond market."

How does he do that? It's actually a rather complex strategy in which Calamos goes long on convertible bonds and shorts the underlying stocks. "The strategy works best in a very volatile market, which is what we've been in," Calamos points out. "But if you think that the stock market is going to rally, this is not the fund to be in. It's never going to hit a big home run. But there is something to be said for a steady and growing net asset value." Amen, brother.

Now, I'm not saying Calamos's strategy is surefire by any means. Nor is it the only way to play the absolute-return game. My point is that Calamos is striving to provide his investors with a positive return each year--which, by the way, is what hedge funds are supposed to do--and he has done a pretty good job of it.

That game plan would sit well with Richard Cripps, the chief market strategist at Legg Mason, who came by the other day to outline his version of an absolute-return strategy. (Somewhat ironic given that Legg Mason's superstar fund manager, Bill Miller, is famous for his relative outperformance of the S&P 500 over the past 12 years, even though in each of the past three years his fund was down.) Cripps's model portfolio is now 60% stocks--with a strong bias toward shares that pay healthy dividends--and 40% bonds. "Long-term forecasts are somewhere between useless and dangerous," says Cripps. "But all signs point to this being the best strategy for investors going forward." Sounds more like useful and safe to me. Just like the tortoise.