Bond Guru Performance Smackdown: Bill Gross vs. Jeffrey Gundlach

From LearnBonds:

 2013 has been a wild year so far for bond investors, with rates hitting two year highs in yesterday’s trade.While its easy to make money in bonds when interest rates are falling, the true test of a bond fund manager is if they are able to earn a return for their investors, or at least minimize losses, when interest rates rise sharply. Let’s have a look at how two of the most well known bond managers in the world, PIMCO’s Bill Gross and DoubleLine Capital’s Jeffrey Gundlach have performed so far in 2013.

While both managers participate in other funds as well, they are known for their lead portfolio manager positions on their flagship funds. For Bill Gross that is the PIMCO Total Return Fund and for Jeffrey Gundlach that is the DoubleLine Total Return Fund.

Jeffrey Gundlach 2013 Performance
Introducing first, fighting out of the blue corner, is DoubleLine Capital’s founder and CEO Jeffrey Gundlach. After acting as one of the top performing bond fund managers in the world at the Helm of the TCW Total Return Fund, Gundlach formed his own firm Doubleline Capital in 2010. DoubleLine Total Return Fund

Year To Date Returns: -.89% 

While he has a loss for the year, Gundlach has outperformed his benchmark (the Barclays US Aggregate Bond Index) by 1.79% and the average intermediate term bond fund by 1.51%. That put’s Gundlach in the top 6% of intermediate term bond fund managers for 2013 according to Morningstar...MORE