Kashif Ahmed, who founded American Private Wealth in Woburn, Massachusetts, chose the Prudential fund partly because the managers also run money for the insurer Prudential Financial Inc., PIM’s parent. Prudential Fixed Income, part of the insurance company’s asset management business, oversees $550 billion in bonds.

“Insurance companies have to buy fixed-income,” said Ahmed. “It’s in their DNA.”

The Prudential Total Return fund has outperformed with a series of timely bets on sectors of the bond market and with a view, articulated in 2013, that interest rates would stay low for an extended period.

Bank Bonds

The managers this year have favored bank bonds. The fund has 11 percent of its money in the bonds, more than twice their allocation in the benchmark Barclay’s U.S. Aggregate Bond Index.

“We felt that given the regulatory environment, banks were going to de-risk and be more like utilities,” said Collins, 52. “That’s a a plus for debt holders.”

At the same time the fund limited its exposure to industrial bonds, which are vulnerable to falling commodity prices and weakening exports. Bank bonds have gained 2.6 percent this year, compared with 0.6 for industrial bonds, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch indexes.

The fund has roughly one-third of its money in asset-backed securities, a mix of commercial mortgages and collateralized loan obligations, or packages of loans. Both products offer returns that are higher than comparably rated corporate bonds, and come with less risk, said Robert Tipp, 52, a manager on the fund since 2002.

Low Rates

A Bank of America Merrill Lynch global collateralized index gained 1.9 percent this year.

In September 2013, with the yield on the 10-year Treasury note at about 3 percent, Tipp wrote a paper called “The Low Ranger,” in which he predicted that yields would stay below 3 percent over the near and medium-term.

He reasoned that in the aftermath of the financial crisis, consumers would need to cut their level of debt, leading to sub- par growth and low inflation for the foreseeable future. The yield on 10-year Treasuries has averaged 2.3 percent since the end of 2013, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

“A little bit of bad news is not bad for bonds,” Collins said.

Bullish On Bonds

That forecast led managers in 2014 to increase the fund’s duration, or sensitivity to changes in interest rates, helping it outperform 94 percent of peers.