Morningstar Portfolio Manager Awards

We have long monitored Morningstar Fund Manager of the Year Awards. We maintain a list of total return bond fund portfolios that use total return bond funds managed by these award winning managers as candidate funds.  For more details on these portfolios and the methodology behind them, please read June 3, 2013: Total Return Bond Fund Portfolios For Major Brokerages. These fixed income portfolios have consistently outperformed even these bond funds themselves and can be used as core fixed income investment portfolios. 

Starting from this year, Morningstar has changed its fund manager award methodology (see this): instead of giving out awards for fixed income and equity categories, Morningstar now gives out awards to outstanding portfolio manager, in addition to two other categories: rising talent (manager) and exemplary stewardship (for a firm). In the outstanding portfolio manager award category, it will only select one manager among all of fund types including equity and bonds. 

More due diligence

Since there is no longer a stand alone category for fixed income manager award, we’ll have to do more due diligence to choose a fund to be included in our total return bond fund list. We’ll basically look at bond funds that are managed by the chosen outstanding portfolio manager (if it happens to be a fixed income manager) and the nominees in this category. Furthermore, as the candidate fund list grows bigger, we’ll also look at the existing funds from time to time and remove some of them from the list if needed.