Dan Ivascyn and Alfred Murata just won back Pimco's [profile] old "bond king" crown, at least in active management. Yet he didn't do it with the old flagship fund made famous by formerly-estranged Pimco co-founder Bill Gross.

Daniel J. Ivascyn Pimco Group Chief Investment Officer

Bloomberg, Reuters, and the Wall Street Journal all report that in March the Pimco Income Fund passed TCW's Metropolitan West Total Return Bond Fund to become the biggest actively managed bond fund in the world. The Pimco Income Fund, which celebrated its 10th anniversary on March 30, had $79.1 billion in AUM as of March 31, compared to $78.9 billion for the MetWest Total Return Fund.

"At Pimco we don't strive to have the largest funds, we strive to be the best," Ivascyn, group chief investment officer at Pimco and PM of the Pimco Income Fund alongside Murata, tells Reuters.

The Pimco Income Fund beat 99 percent of its peers over the last three and five years, Bloomberg notes.

"Our investment process and active management have produced significant gains for our clients and we believe the current environment will continue to present more opportunities for investors who actively pursue them," Ivascyn tells Bloomberg.

Pimco's old flagship fund, the Pimco Total Return Fund previously run by Gross before he left Pimco for Janus in September 2014, had $73.6 billion in AUM as of March 31, 2017, down from its April 2013 peak of $293 billion. That fund, which launched in 1987, held the "biggest active bond fund" crown for years before being passed last year by the MetWest Total Return Fund. (Pimco's total AUM as of December 31, 2016 was $1.47 trillion, down from its March 2013 peak of $2.3 trillion.)

Meanwhile, a giant passive mutual fund, the Vanguard Total Bond Market Index Fund, still holds another old Pimco Total Return Fund crown: "biggest bond fund". The Vanguard fund had $176.1 billion in AUM as of February 28, according to Vanguard, and Morningstar estimates that it rose to $177.9 billion as of yesterday.

As of December 31, 2016, Pimco had $1.47 trillion in overall AUM. 

Edited by: Neil Anderson, Managing Editor


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