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Fund Manager Focus: Jeffery Elswick, Manager, Frost Total Return Bond Fund
"The fund also ranks in the top 1% of its short-term category for the one-, three-and five-year periods. While those results are impressive, the comparison is a bit misleading. The short-term categorization from Morningstar is merely a reflection of the fund’s current portfolio, which has an average effective duration of about three years." (Barron's profile, my emphasis)
FATRX is not a ST bond fund, and neither is THOPX (as some MFOers recently characterized it in another thread); they are total return bond funds which, for now, have chosen to keep their durations short enough, for long enough, that M* has thrown them into the ST bond category (resulting, IMO, in some pretty serious distortions in relative performance and purpose).
Nonetheless, I checked out FATRX awhile back and thought Elswick could become a good one. His core plus portfolio has been and is presently somewhat different than standard fare. Too bad it comes with a FEL=2.25%; just such a turnoff for me
Even the fund company themselves advertise FATRX as an intermediate term bond fund according to it's fact sheet which is linked below for those that are interested in viewing.
Comments
FATRX is not a ST bond fund, and neither is THOPX (as some MFOers recently characterized it in another thread); they are total return bond funds which, for now, have chosen to keep their durations short enough, for long enough, that M* has thrown them into the ST bond category (resulting, IMO, in some pretty serious distortions in relative performance and purpose).
Nonetheless, I checked out FATRX awhile back and thought Elswick could become a good one. His core plus portfolio has been and is presently somewhat different than standard fare. Too bad it comes with a FEL=2.25%; just such a turnoff for me
https://www.frostbank.com/SiteCollectionDocuments/Investments/Ratings/Retail Class A Fact Sheets/TotalReturnBondClassA.pdf