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Revealed: The Bonds Elite, and where they work
Citywire’s Bonds Elite list is out. Here, we look at the groups that employ the most managers from the list.
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Outstanding performance is hard enough to achieve, and to do so consistently is that rarest of things. But such managers do exist, and Citywire Amplify has looked for funds that have proved themselves to be more than a flash in the pan. We have compiled a list of the world’s best fixed income fund managers, which joins our Equities Elite.
The Bonds Elite comprises 225 managers, who run 251 funds.
As with the Equities Elite list, some groups have contributed several names. While 119 groups contribute at least one manager to the list, 28 of them work at four firms.
Payden & Rygel and Fidelity Investments top the list, with eight managers each, followed by American Funds and Pimco, with six each.
Of the three companies employing five Bonds Elite managers, BlueBay, PGIM Investments and Lazard Frères Gestion, the last stands out. Lazard has a total of 11 active managers, meaning the elite represents 45.5% of their total, compared to BlueBay’s 18.5% and PGIM’s 11.9%.
Top four asset managers by members of the Bonds Elite
- Payden & Rygel: Here, the eight elite managers run a total of four funds, with assets of $1bn.
- Fidelity Investments: The elite at Fidelity Investments manage seven funds, for a total of $126bn.
- American Funds: With four funds run between their six managers, the American Funds elite managers oversee a total of $108.9bn.
- Pimco: Pimco’s six elite managers run eight funds, with total assets under management of $65.8bn. Of the top four firms, Pimco is the only to contribute a female manager to the elite: Eve Tournier.
Notable names
The managers with the most funds on our list – see the methodology below – are Justin Jewell, at BlueBay Asset Management’s global leveraged finance group, and Harald Riise-Hanssen, from KLP, running seven funds each.
The managers with the most assets under management are Fergus MacDonald and David Betanzos. They are the joint managers of three American Funds strategies. Their funds amount to $95bn.
The manager assigned to their fund for the longest time is Fred Kelly, who has been running Freedom Funds Management Company’s Colorado Bondshares A Tax Exempt fund since 1990. The fund has been hovering over the sector average since May 2013, in Citywire’s total return graph, and ranks fourth of 453 funds in the sector over the past 10 years, with a return of 42.4%.
At the opposite end is Michael Scott, who started managing the Man GLG RI Sustainable Credit Opportunities fund in June 2022.
There are 15 female managers on the list, from 12 different groups. That’s 6.7% – a lower proportion than the Equities Elite grouping, which was recalculated in October. The Equities Elite has 36 women out of a 381-strong list, or 9.4%.
Citywire Amplify will be catching up with the managers who made the list over the coming weeks and months.
How did we do it?
To pinpoint skill, demonstrated consistently over time, Citywire performed a new quantitative analysis of the managers we track.
Citywire has tracked fund managers for 23 years, currently following 17,000 active managers in 84 countries.
Manager analysis is based on the calculation of our proprietary Manager Ratio (MR) – based on the information ratio for each fund – aggregated across the funds each manager runs. This is attributed to the manager.
All managers with a positive MR based on the last three years of performance are attributed a Citywire fund manager rating. The top 10% of this pool are given AAA, the next 20% AA, the next 30% A and the final 40% get a + rating.
To create this new list, Citywire applied some extra criteria:
- Managers must have a three-year track record in managing one or more funds in any of the equity sectors Citywire covers.
- Managers must have a positive MR in at least nine of the past 12 month-to-month rolling three-year periods.
- Managers must have a positive MR in the three most recent rolling three-year periods
- The positive MR must be in the top 30% of all positive MRs in each period.
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