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Analyst Report
Morningstar's Take
|11/02/2025

by Eric Jacobson
BlackRock Strategic Income Opportunities has carved out a sweet spot of good performance with less risk in an otherwise disparate group of very flexible offerings.

The strategy relies on three veteran managers, with the most recent addition, Russ Brownback, working behind the scenes for decades with Rick Rieder before he was added to the manager lineup in 2022. BlackRock veteran David Rogal has also been on the roster since 2017, and the three get additional help from Chi Chen, also a comanager on the firm's Total Return offering. The stable of portfolio managers and analysts across disciplines on which they draw is among the best and largest of any in the industry.

BlackRock's extensive capabilities synthesize meticulous macroeconomic and bottom-up research that this team uses to identify big trends affecting markets and position the portfolio accordingly. This can be more art than science, but Rieder is a voracious consumer of data and labors to digest large amounts of information into actionable themes while relying mostly on the firm's sector teams for individual security selection. While the strategy's duration can range between negative 2.0 years and positive 7.0 years, he and the team have managed it actively, but within a range of 0.0-4.0 years. They have been similarly dynamic with sector and credit allocations but usually with less aggressive leanings there, too. The strategy has no portfolio benchmark and is very diversified, emphasizing the taking of many small bets rather than fewer large ones, and uses derivatives to hedge risks as well as to take outright positions.

That flexibility has helped in several periods of market stress, including 2022's awful year for bonds. The team kept risk in check and adjusted nimbly to the year's zig-zagging market, with the US-domiciled vehicle's institutional shares outpacing its average distinct peer in the nontraditional bond Morningstar Category by 60 basis points and broad-market indexes by more than 600 basis points. The strategy then produced a 7.3% gain in 2023 that, while a little short of more aggressive peers, was well ahead of most broad market indexes by at least 150 basis points. A similar 2024 outcome left the portfolio behind its median peer but more than 4 percentage points ahead of the Bloomberg US Aggregate Bond index.

From September 2010 through January 2025, the 3.4% per-year gain of the US vehicle's institutional shares outperformed two thirds of its distinct peers, while its volatility-adjusted performance (as measured by Sharpe ratio) over the same period was similarly impressive. It shouldn't come as a surprise if the portfolio's raw returns sometimes hew closer to average given how much less risk it takes than nontraditional rivals that stretch for returns with higher-octane credit exposures, though its level of volatility likely will be easier to stomach.

 
Morningstar Medalist Rating™The goal here is to control risk and make a little bit of money a lot of times.
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Morningstar Pillars
PeopleHigh
ParentAbove Average
ProcessHigh
 
Morningstar Medalist RatingMorningstar assigns the Medalist Rating to funds that are qualitatively and quantitatively assessed through manager research and algorithmic processes. The assessment turns on three key “pillars” – People, Process, and Parent – that yield an estimate of how well a fund will perform before fees but after adjusting for risk.
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