By Jennifer Ablan
NEW YORK (Reuters) - DoubleLine Funds, whose co-founder Jeffrey Gundlach is widely followed for his investment calls, on Monday reported $688.7 million in net additional investments in July, the 18th consecutive month it has attracted new money.
The Los Angeles-based firm said the DoubleLine Total Return Bond Fund, its largest portfolio by assets, also had positive inflows in July.
The Total Return fund attracted a net inflow of $390.4 million last month, compared with $81.7 million in June, $408 million in May and $633 million in April. It has $47.2 billion in assets under management and invests primarily in mortgage-backed securities.
"The first seven months of the year, the fund has continued its excellent record relative to peers and the Barclays (LONDON:BARC) aggregate index," said Todd Rosenbluth, director of ETF & Mutual Fund Research at S&P Capital IQ.
"We continue to believe the fund has managed the risks in the bond market well and think investors have confidence in the stable management team at Doubleline ahead of likely pending Federal Reserve policy changes."
The Total Return fund, which marked its five-year anniversary in April, has delivered a total return of 1.94 percent year-to-date as of July 31, surpassing 98 percent of its peers in the Morningstar intermediate-term bond category.
The DoubleLine Total Return Bond Fund has been a beneficiary of net withdrawals from the Pimco Total Return Fund, which lost its crown as the biggest bond fund in the world in April.
DoubleLine's Core Fixed Income Fund, which invests in various intermediate-term bonds, had net inflows of $115 million in July, compared with $154.8 million in June and $87.9 million in May, bringing its year-to-date net inflow to $1.1 billion.
The DoubleLine Core Fixed Income Fund is an open-end intermediate-term bond fund that invests in different sectors of the fixed-income universe, including corporate securities, bank debt, emerging-markets debt and Treasuries as well as mortgage- backed securities. The fund has $4.5 billion in assets.
Last year, Gundlach correctly predicted that U.S. Treasury yields would fall, not rise as many others had forecast, because inflationary pressures were non-existent and technical factors, including aging demographics, were at play.
The Los Angeles-based DoubleLine Capital had $76 billion in assets under management as of June 30.