Bill Gross is (professionally) dead and gone, shipped off to the glue factory where one-time Triple Crown winners go when their time has passed, and all that is left is to have embarrassingly delayed insights about who one truly is. And yet, five years after his unceremonious but highly and hilariously litigious exit from PIMCO, he still haunts the place, and not only in the Bill Gross Room and the heads of those former colleagues still suffering from PTSD. For while others may aspire to his crown as Bond King, even in his own former house, none shall ever attain it. Thus is the Curse of Bill Gross upon PIMCO, a situation that his successor and would-be heir to the throne Dan Ivascyn understands, as he is a loathesome and vile Red Sox fan.
For much of the past decade, Mr. Ivascyn’s Pimco Income Fund has posted stellar returns. Its surging popularity made it the world’s largest actively managed bond fund and helped salve the wounds at Pimco left by the acrimonious 2014 departure of Mr. Ivascyn’s predecessor, Bill Gross.
So far this year, though, the fund has returned 4.68%, falling short of the fund’s benchmark index and nearly all of its peers, according to Morningstar Direct. Among 338 funds in its category, Pimco Income has underperformed 93%, Morningstar said.
The spell shall not break for at least 81 more years, when Ivacsyn is long dead, and only after those who follow him defeat a holographic Jeff Gundlach in a most improbable way.