When it comes to whether there’s a new bond king in town, Bill Gross is sure of one thing: Jeffrey Gundlach certainly does not carry the crown.
The money manager — widely known by the moniker ‘The Bond King’ for having built Pacific Investment Management Co. over many decades into a fixed-income giant — didn’t mince words against the billionaire founder of DoubleLine Capital, whose investment success he downplayed.
“First of all, to be a bond king or queen, you need a kingdom,” Gross said at a live recording of the Odd Lots podcast at the Future Proof conference for the wealth management industry in Huntington Beach, California. “Pimco had $2 trillion, ok? DoubleLine’s got like $55 billion. Come on — that’s no kingdom, that’s like Latvia or Estonia.”
DoubleLine didn’t immediately respond to an immediate request for comment. Gundlach is slated to speak at the same conference on Tuesday.
Gross described the genesis of their feud: when he was leaving Pimco, he visited Gundlach and asked to work together.
“I went up to his house and said “Maybe I could work with you, we could be two bond kings,” he said during the podcast recording. “And he trashed me for the next 12 months.”
“And look at his record for the last five, six, seven years,” Gross added. “I got you back, Jeff.”
Gundlach founded DoubleLine in 2009. The company manages private and mutual funds, separate account, and closed-end funds, among other things. He’s known for his webcasts, during which he goes through his investment philosophy and market theses. As of the end of 2021, DoubleLine had assets under management of more than $133 billion.
Gross, who manages his own money currently, retired in 2019 after a brief struggle as head of the Janus Henderson Global Unconstrained Bond Fund. His performance there didn’t match the stellar track record he had achieved while building Pimco’s famed Total Return Fund into a bond giant.
Gross reflected on that multi-decade career, saying that a large part of his becoming well-known for his bond-market prowess was due to the fixed-income bull market that took place while he was at Pimco.
“I don’t think there could be another bond king,” Gross said. “It was the function of a bull market for 30 years that was growing and Pimco was doing well.”
Now, he sees a new generation of bond royalty that has nothing to do with individual investment managers.
“The bond kings and queens are at the Fed,” he added. “So they’re in charge.”