DoubleLine Total Return Fund Gets Off to a Fast Start

Manager Jeffrey Gundlach balances risks in this unusual mortgage fund.

DoubleLine Total Return launched less than two years ago, but lead manager Jeffrey Gundlach has been investing in mortgage bonds for 25 years. The secret sauce, he says, is to balance government-agency mortgage-backed securities (46% of the portfolio at last report)—which carry no default risk but a lot of interest-rate risk—with non-agency mortgage-backed bonds (38% of assets), which have little interest-rate risk but high default risk. The result: a low-volatility fund with an 8% yield and a 12-month return that is near the top of the intermediate-bond category. Gundlach insists he isn’t a gunslinger: “If I were trying to shoot out the lights, I wouldn’t have 15% in cash right now.”

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Nellie S. Huang
Senior Associate Editor, Kiplinger's Personal Finance

Nellie joined Kiplinger in August 2011 after a seven-year stint in Hong Kong. There, she worked for the Wall Street Journal Asia, where as lifestyle editor, she launched and edited Scene Asia, an online guide to food, wine, entertainment and the arts in Asia. Prior to that, she was an editor at Weekend Journal, the Friday lifestyle section of the Wall Street Journal Asia. Kiplinger isn't Nellie's first foray into personal finance: She has also worked at SmartMoney (rising from fact-checker to senior writer), and she was a senior editor at Money.