FTGF BW Glb FI A EUR H Acc IH

Analyst Report
Morningstar's Take
|10/10/2023

by Saraja Samant
FTGF Brandywine Global Fixed Income’s experienced team plies an intrepid yet well-orchestrated process, but its narrower universe compared with sibling FTGF Brandywine Global Opportunistic Fixed Income can hold it back.

The strategy is in the hands of the same capable leaders as its sibling. David Hoffman, who has overseen Brandywine’s global fixed-income strategies since the 1990s, has led this strategy since its 2003 launch alongside comanager Jack McIntyre, who joined the firm in 1998. In May 2016, the firm hired Anujeet Sareen, formerly a veteran of Wellington Management Company’s global fixed-income group. Sareen’s global macro background aligns with the firm’s distinctive investment style, and he has now stepped into a leading role here alongside Hoffman. In early 2021, credit specialist Brian Kloss and mortgage expert Tracy Chen, both veterans of the firm’s taxable-bond team, joined the management squad as well, adding to the heft.

The team’s process is truly active. The managers disregard issuance-weighted indexes, preferring instead to search for high real yields and undervalued currencies in countries with strong or improving fundamentals. That has led to significant emerging-markets exposure and little exposure to low- to negative-yielding developed-markets staples such as Japan. While the portfolio’s constraints are flexible, strong research guides the team’s approach to building it along with a cautious eye toward valuations. More recently that has led the portfolio to take a larger active bet on the Japanese yen (20% of assets as of June 2023, 8 percentage points overweight relative to its FTSE World Government Bond Index) which has hurt the strategy’s performance as the yen continued to slump against all major developed-markets currencies.

The team has been diligent about trimming positions when valuations are stretched, but its tendency to take outsize bets in high-conviction positions can result in volatile performance. Unlike its sibling, whose broader opportunity set includes corporate, securitized, and high-yield debt, this strategy since 2010 has stuck to sovereign and quasi-sovereign bonds rated investment-grade, which can limit its ability to take advantage of market dislocations in those sectors.

This strategy’s limitations can be a hindrance over the long term. For example, while the fund ended 2020 in a positive return territory despite significant underperformance in that year’s first quarter’s coronavirus-driven selloff, it still lagged the majority of its global bond Morningstar Category peers thanks to its inability to invest in corporate debt, which drove most of its competitors returns. Corporate credit isn’t in the remit here, yet the volatility has been similar to its all-encompassing sister fund. Over the trailing 10 years through September 2023, the fund’s clean share class (A USD) lost 2.2%, almost a percentage point worse than its peer median’s 1.2% loss. However, the volatility of its returns (as measured by standard deviation) was higher than its typical rival’s.
 
Morningstar Medalist Rating™Limited flexibility hampers an otherwise solid global bond offering.
To find out how Morningstar rates a fund click here.
Morningstar Pillars
PeopleAbove Average
ParentAverage
ProcessAverage
 
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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