"Gross is a very capable investment manager. He's not God," said Carl Nelson, executive secretary and chief investment officer of the $1.1 billion San Luis Obispo County Pension Trust.
Instead, institutional investors such as Nelson, who can take months to make decisions, will want to see how Gross settles into his new role managing the Janus Global Unconstrained Bond Fund, which has about $13 million under management.
To be sure, more than a dozen fund representative and consultants told Reuters that they have hesitations about leaving Pimco, which Gross co-founded more than 40 years ago.
"We hired Pimco as an organization, we didn't hire Bill Gross as an individual to manage our money," said Stephen Rauh, the chairman of the $4 billion Vermont Pension Investment Committee, which has Pimco on its "watch list."
Pimco's Total Return Fund, which Gross ran personally for 27 years and has about $222 billion in assets, appears most vulnerable to poaching, said analysts at Susquehanna Financial Group.
"BLK (BlackRock) is likely the biggest beneficiary," analyst Doug Sipkin said.
Bringing In A Star
Meanwhile, few fund firms have had a harder time than Janus over the past decade as its stock funds fell out of favor. Janus has struggled for years to recapture the status it lost during the dot-com crash. Its assets peaked at more than $300 billion in 2000 and stood at $178 billion at the end of June.
Janus CEO Dick Weil hopes Gross will attract money to a stable of bond funds that have just $31.4 billion in assets under management as of June 30. That's up from $9.2 billion four years ago.