Leading fund manager PIMCO has won the Australian Bonds Award in the Financial Review Smart Investor Blue Ribbon Awards 2011.
The awards aim to provide a comprehensive, independent evaluation of banking, insurance and investment products in the market and are recognised as the industry’s premier awards.
In Australia, PIMCO manages more than $30 billion across a comprehensive range of fixed interest and risk overlay strategies for large superannuation funds, institutional investors, self managed super funds, and thousands of individual investors.
PIMCO’s portfolio team is headed by Robert Mead, Head of Portfolio Management. Mr Mead said PIMCO was pleased to have won the award for the second successive year.
“The PIMCO team always focuses on identifying the safest forms of fundamentally sound risk-adjusted returns,” Mr Mead said.
“In Australia, we achieve this by preferring Residential Mortgage-backed Securities (“RMBS”), Australian bank bonds and other high quality corporate bonds.
“In this New Normal environment, we expect ongoing market volatility, which requires increased allocations to liquid assets in order to be able to capitalise upon opportunities as they arise,” Mr Mead said.
Morningstar, a leading provider of independent investment research which undertook the fund analysis for the Financial Review Smart Investor Blue Ribbon Awards 2011, said the EQT/PIMCO Australian Bond Fund is a top-notch vehicle for investing in Australian bonds.
“Robert Mead leads a high-powered and extremely proficient team, plugged into the immense network of knowledge wielded by the firm and drawing on the house’s acknowledged mastery of and expertise in fixed interest investing,” Morningstar said. “These characteristics all make the PIMCO/EQT Australian Bond Fund a champion among fixed income funds.”
The primary filter for the Financial Review Smart Investor Blue Ribbon Awards is Morningstar Recommendations, which are qualitative assessments. The next filter is quantitative, based on peer-relative risk-adjusted assessments of fund performances over one, three, five, and where applicable 10 years. The final filter is the one-year performance ranking, as these are annual awards.