Global investment firm Thornburg Investment Management has launched a new mutual fund that seeks higher returns while encountering an elevated level of volatility.
The Thornburg Core Plus Bond Fund (THCIX) will include an underlying investment lineup of mostly U.S. investment-grade fixed-income bonds. It also has the flexibility to expand its investment profile to include securities and bonds below investment grade, the Santa Fe, N.M.-based firm said in a release.
Managers of the fund also can invest 25% in high-yield investments, although Jeff Klingelhofer, co-head of Investments at Thornburg, said that is not expected to happen regularly.
“Various managers will tend to pull that handle more heavily and more frequently,” he said. “Thornburg is likely to pull it only when we truly feel well compensated to take risks.”
The fund will not have a specific limit on the duration or maturity of the debt obligations the fund purchases, according to the prospectus.
“The fund will, however, generally seek to maintain a portfolio of investments with a dollar-weighted average duration that falls within two years of the dollar-weighted average duration of the fund’s benchmark index, the Bloomberg U.S. Aggregate Bond Index,” the prospectus states.
The fund is viewed as an investment that can thrive at a time when negative or zero interest rates are a thing of the past, Klingelhofer said,
“Within that landscape, we want to offer investors the ability to keep up and pursue purchasing power through higher returns than core bonds,” he said.
The fund comes in A, C, and I class shares with a $2,500 minimum for all but the C-class shares, which have a $2,000 minimum, according to the fund’s prospectus. It has a 49-basis-point management fee for all three classes and a 0.25% 12b-1 fee for the A class and a 1% 12b-1 fee for the C class.
The C shares are only available in commission-based accounts, the firm said. Advisors cannot put them into a client account that is fee-based.