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August 19, 2003 at 08:00 PM
It may be called Pimco All Asset Fund, but in its brief one-year life, it has been more like an “all asset but not much stock” fund. And so far, that approach has provided mixed results to its investors.
As the name of the $462 million fund suggests, portfolio manager Robert Arnott has wide latitude to shift his portfolio among different markets in search of strong returns. The fund invests not in individual securities but in shares of other funds sponsored by Pacific Investment Management Co., or Pimco.
The fund is allowed to have as much as 50% of its portfolio in stocks, but since Pimco All Asset was launched in July 2002, Arnott, who is chairman of money manager First Quadrant L.P., hasn’t even come close to that figure. While the fund’s stock exposure has sometimes topped 20%, Arnott says he now has just 7% of fund assets in U.S. stocks.
Looking at current market conditions, Arnott — the first outside “subadviser” hired by Pimco to run one of its funds — says “the run-up in bond yields is not helpful to stocks.” As a result, “we’ve been paring back our equity holdings in the last week or two,” he says, and shifting more into the inflation-indexed Treasury securities that have been the fund’s biggest holding all along.
Still, Arnott says the fund is on track to meet its primary goal — delivering a return that exceeds the rate of inflation by at least five percentage points. Inflation has recently been running a little over 2%, suggesting an annual return target of 7% or so.
