Measuring What Matters In Public And Private Fixed Income

2026-05-27 09:15:00 ET

Key takeaways:

• Bond benchmarks are useful but not investable: Because fixed income indices are essentially impossible to replicate in a portfolio, investors should consider more relevant comparisons to evaluate passive and active bond performance.
• Active management has tended to benefit bonds: When measured against passive portfolios investors can actually own – rather than theoretical bond indices – most actively managed bond portfolios have outperformed their passive peers, especially over longer time periods.
• Private credit has no true benchmark: In the absence of a standard yardstick, direct lending can appear to perform well by default; however, alternative measures of relative performance suggest excess returns versus adjacent public credit markets have narrowed in recent years.

Read the full article on Seeking Alpha

For further details see: