By Ian Salisbury
If there's one thing fund investors know by now, it's that actively managed funds don't beat the market. When it comes to bonds, that might not be as true as you think.
More than two out of three active bond funds beat comparable index funds for the 12 months ended in June, according to Morningstar's most recent comparison of active and passive strategies. The story was even better for key bond funds that form the bedrock of many investors' portfolios: Nearly three in four intermediate-term core bond funds beat similar index funds, Morningstar found.
How did they do it? Active funds tend to have more credit risk but shorter durations than comparable index funds. That allowed them to navigate the Federal Reserve's wait-and-see approach to rate cuts while taking advantage of the strong economy. (Duration is a measure of the interest-rate risk associated with a bond's maturity, yield, and other factors.)
Morningstar also looked at how active bond funds fared in the long term. Over the past decade, 46% of intermediate-core funds beat similar passive ones. That's much better than it might appear at first glance.
To come up with the number, Morningstar tracks every fund in the category -- from $50 billion behemoths to upstart funds that survive for just a few years. Only 56% of the 134 funds that started the 10-year period ended up finishing it. The good news is most investors tend to crowd into larger, more established funds with better brand names and track records.
If you calculate active bond funds' performance on an asset-weighted basis, counting larger funds more heavily -- much the way indexes like the S&P 500 tilt toward larger stocks -- they look even better.
The average asset-weighted return for intermediate-core bond funds for the past decade was 1.6% a year, beating index funds' 1.3% return. In other words, while slightly fewer than half of the active bond funds beat index funds, investors who put their money in active bond funds tended to end up with better returns than index investors.
That's far better than the results for large-blend active U.S. stock funds, where only about 15% of them have beaten index funds in the past decade, and the group's asset-weighted return lagged behind passive funds by 1.3 percentage points.
There are a number of reasons active bond funds might succeed where stock funds fail.
"There are characteristics of the fixed-income markets that really favor active management," says Gregory Hall, Pimco's head of U.S. global wealth management. "When it comes to the complexity of the bond market versus the stock market, the bond market is an order of magnitude more complex."
Another reason, as mentioned above, is that stock indexes tend to be weighted by market values, so companies like Apple, Nvidia, and Microsoft make up the biggest holdings in popular index funds.
Bond indexes tend to be weighted by a similar, but fundamentally different, measure -- the total value of an issuer's outstanding debt. That doesn't necessarily signal bullishness: Governments issue bonds for political and macroeconomic reasons, while weak companies may have billions in outstanding debt and healthy ones none.
One outcome is that index funds tend to take a big bet on Treasuries while neglecting other bonds that might offer higher yields. The iShares Core U.S. Aggregate Bond exchange-traded fund has roughly 45% of its assets invested in government bonds, compared with just 31% on average for funds in Morningstar's intermediate-core category. The move costs investors: The iShares fund yields 3.4%, compared with 3.7% for active funds in the same category.
Bond indexing comes with practical problems too. While most companies offer just a single class of stock, there are often a blizzard of bonds with different maturities and terms. Morningstar's database includes 55,000 stocks and more than 6.2 million bonds.
The upshot is that bond indexes are at best a rough approximation of the fixed-income market, while some important areas, such as collateralized loan obligations and nonagency residential mortgage securities, aren't included in popular bond benchmarks and lack passive funds to track them.
So how can investors sniff out the bond funds that will be longtime winners? To try to answer the question, we asked Morningstar for a list of all active bond funds in the intermediate-core and intermediate-core-plus categories with a 10-year record. (Core-plus funds follow the same investing mandate as core funds but have more flexibility to invest in sectors like junk bonds, bank loans, and emerging markets debt.)
Among the 130-plus funds on the list, we looked for those with established reputations (at least $100 million in assets) and relatively low fees (expense ratios of 0.5% or below) and relatively low investment minimums (although some can only be purchased through an advisor.) We then sorted them by performance against the Bloomberg U.S. Aggregate Bond Index.
The overall winner? The $2.3 billion Eaton Vance Total Return Bond ETF, which posted 10-year average annual returns of 3.4%, handily beating the index's 1.84%. The fund, which began its life as a traditional mutual fund run by Morgan Stanley Investment Management, converted to an ETF in March following Morgan Stanley's 2021 acquisition of Eaton Vance.
A number of well-known bond giants also made our list: The $85 billion Dodge & Cox Income, which returned 2.91%, and the $41 billion Fidelity Total Bond, which returned 2.68%.
Write to Ian Salisbury at ian.salisbury@barrons.com
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(END) Dow Jones Newswires
October 11, 2024 21:30 ET (01:30 GMT)
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