Jeffrey Gundlach sees too much of a good thing -- in financial markets and in his industry -- and he wants no part of it.
The co-founder and chief executive officer of DoubleLine Capital LP says risky assets such as junk bonds and emerging-market debt are overvalued. He’s reducing those positions in DoubleLine funds and investing more in higher-quality credits with less sensitivity to rising interest rates, mindful that doing so may mean he gives up some performance for a while.
Gundlach, 57, says he can’t predict what event or development will trigger a change in investor sentiment. Like Howard Marks, the co-chairman of Oaktree Capital Group LLC, who last month warned that markets had crossed into “too-bullish territory,” Gundlach says it’s better to be cautious now than to hold on until it’s too late.
“If you’re waiting for the catalyst to show itself, you’re going to be selling at a lower price," he said in a phone interview Monday from DoubleLine’s office in Los Angeles. “This is not the time period where you say, ‘I can buy anything and not worry about the risk of it.’ The time to do that was 18 months ago.”
‘Turning Money Away’
Gundlach is taking a similarly conservative approach to building his eight-year-old firm. While some competitors embrace the mantra “size matters,” he believes there’s a limit to how much DoubleLine can manage well and says the firm may stop marketing altogether once assets reach $150 billion, up from about $110 billion today.
“I’ve actually been turning money away in our institutional business,” Gundlach said. “I don’t want to manage $500 billion. I don’t really want to manage $200 billion.”
That attitude is out of step with an industry that prioritizes asset growth, both as a means to generate more revenue and as a way to defray fixed expenses such as technology and compliance. Janus Capital Group and Aberdeen Asset Management Plc each combined with other firms in part to gain scale. Vanguard Group has more than quadrupled its assets to $4.4 trillion in less than a decade, and in an interview in March, Larry Fink, whose BlackRock Inc. oversees $5.7 trillion, said “scale has become a greater necessity -- and for us a greater advantage.”
Bill Gross once managed a single fund with $293 billion in assets, the Pimco Total Return Fund. By comparison, Gundlach, who co-founded DoubleLine in 2009, said he’s debated whether to close the $54 billion DoubleLine Total Return Bond Fund, the firm’s largest, to new money.
Investing Style