Each month we track changes to the management teams of actively managed, equity-oriented funds and ETFs. That excludes index funds and most fixed income funds. The index fund exclusion is pretty straightforward: in a passive fund, the managers are interchangeable cogs whose presence or absence is almost always inconsequential to the fund’s performance.

Similarly, most bond fund managers have a very limited ability to add value. For instance, over the past ten years, the top-performing Core Bond fund in the Lipper universe outperformed its peers by just 1% per year with a virtually identical Sharpe ratio (0.98 for the top returning fund, 0.97 for the top returning the average fund). The best global income and flexible income managers outperformed by 3.5 and 2.4%, respectively, which is comparable to the margin between the best large-core equity fund managers and the pack.

This month, we noted just 37 funds with changes in their management teams. The most eye-catching is the dismissal of PIMCO from its role in sub-advising Harbor Bond. For years, PIMCO Total Return (PTTRX) was the biggest, meanest, surest-bet around with $300 billion in assets … and Harbor Bond was its low fee, low minimum, no-load clone. Times change.