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Thomas Swaney

Portfolio > Economy & Markets > Fixed Income

This Hedge Fund Pro Is Remaking Northern Trust's Fixed Income Investing Process

By John Manganaro

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What You Need to Know

  • Tom Swaney, a 25-year veteran of the U.S. bond market and hedge fund industries, has been global fixed income CIO since September.
  • Among his goals is collaboration between the fixed income and equity groups.
  • He expects the Fed will be successful in bringing down core inflation but acknowledges the outlook is complicated.

Northern Trust Asset Management is making significant progress in its ongoing effort to reimagine and modernize its investment approach for clients on both the equity and fixed income sides of the portfolio, according to Tom Swaney, NTAM’s chief investment officer of global fixed income.

In a new interview with ThinkAdvisor, Swaney said the firm has embraced a “new paradigm” for its fixed income team, and there is also a new approach to collaboration cutting across the fixed income and equity groups.

The main goals? To improve knowledge sharing and to deliver a holistic approach to portfolio building that seeks complementary risk-taking and reward-gathering throughout the investment process.

“The members on the different asset class teams are working in a more coordinated fashion across research, portfolio management, trading and risk,” Swaney said.

According to Swaney, the reorganized and reinvigorated process is already seeking better risk-adjusted performance for NTAM’s institutional and individual clients, and it is helping to ensure the firm’s approach keeps up with the rapid innovations occurring all across the fixed income and equity investing process.

Swaney said the work also includes bringing in new insights from the world of hedge fund investing, noting that his own background includes extensive time working in that part of the industry — and that many major asset management firms could benefit from embracing such an approach.

Taking a Page From the Hedge Fund Industry

Back in April 2022, NTAM first announced that Swaney had joined the firm as an executive vice president and co-head of fixed income for the global financial institution.

The statement announcing his appointment indicated that Swaney, a 25-year veteran of the U.S. bond market and hedge fund industries, would equally share oversight responsibility for the firm’s expansive fixed income investing operations with Colin Robertson, himself a 35-year veteran of fixed income investing. Their joint roles were envisioned as part of a succession plan on which Robertson had been working closely with Angelo Manioudakis, NTAM’s chief investment officer, to prepare for his eventual retirement.

Robertson has since retired, and Swaney has become the firm’s sole CIO of global fixed income, reporting directly to Manioudakis. Notably, Swaney’s background includes a stint as a managing partner with Lantern Harbor Investment Partners, a Boston-based institutional fixed income investment firm he co-founded with Manioudakis.

At the time of Swaney’s hiring at NTAM, Manioudakis said the fixed income investment landscape was evolving rapidly, and that Swaney’s expertise across credit, risk management and derivatives would greatly benefit NTAM and its clients.

“His portfolio construction experience building sophisticated and innovative strategies bolsters our ability to continue meeting the needs of institutional and individual investors, well into the future,” Manioudakis said.

Robertson echoed the sentiment in the press release announcing Swaney’s hiring, suggesting the next decade of fixed income investing “will be very different than the previous one.”

In the new interview, Swaney said he has been impressed with the open spirit of collaboration and the willingness to innovate that he has encountered so far at NTAM.

“NTAM has been known in the past for having a strong focus on the fundamentals — on the blocking and tackling of fixed income investing, if you will,” Swaney said. “The new approach seeks to unlock and deliver additional alpha on top of the beta that we have been known for.”

What’s Next in Fixed Income

Addressing the outlook for fixed income investors in 2023, Swaney suggested the word “complicated” is probably the best way to summarize things.

“One of the things that happens with fixed income investing, that we are seeking to change, is the fact that people just see fixed income as a single monolithic category,” Swaney said. “Really, the opposite is true. There are so many different types of fixed income investments, and the strategies can be very complex and very diverse.”

According to Swaney, one of the keys to success in the current, highly volatile environment is understanding the importance of quality and duration to fixed income portfolio outcomes.

“In this moment, you have to make sure you have high-enough quality assets with a sufficient amount of duration, so that your portfolio will offer the kind of volatility ballast and income that you expect it to,” Swaney suggested. “Right now, it is important that we do these two things for our clients.”

With respect to the macroeconomic environment, Swaney said, the key question to ask right now is whether one expects that the Federal Reserve is going to be successful in bringing down core inflation — and whether or not the Fed can do so over a relatively short period of time that does not call its inflation-taming power into question.

“My sense is that the Fed will be able to accomplish this goal,” Swaney said. “If that happens, we are actually in a situation where some of the investment-grade and even higher-yield bonds could do pretty well this year. In any case, it’s a very complex outlook in the next six to 12 months.”

Ultimately, Swaney expects the negative correlation between stocks and bonds will reestablish itself by the end of 2023, but it may take some additional pain to get to that point.

“It is still going to take us a while longer to understand whether the Fed is managing to control inflation,” Swaney concluded. “Once the markets get their hands around that, the typical relationship between fixed income and equities should reestablish itself, and fixed income should again be seen as that ballast and diversifier in the portfolio. And, the fixed income side will be generating more income, which is great. A lot of investors are rooting for that outcome.”

(Pictured: Tom Swaney)

John Manganaro

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