Fixed-Income Investments

BNY Asset Management offers an array of fixed-income strategies that can be customized to meet the intricate mandates of institutional investors.

Our strategies include highly liquid, short-term money management solutions, active investment management aimed at generating strong long-term performance. By combining a top-down, macroeconomic assessment with rigorous credit analysis, we seek to create fixed-income portfolios aimed at achieving our clients’ total return objectives with minimal volatility over time.

BNY Asset Management’s Fixed Income Committee is a key group of accomplished senior investment professionals who analyze economic, political and broad bond market trends to formulate fixed-income strategies and asset allocation decisions. The Committee’s well thought-out conclusions provide the structural framework by which our analysts and portfolio managers seek the most promising fixed-income opportunities.

Active Fixed Income
BNY Asset Management built its reputation on its expertise in actively managed fixed-income strategies and our ability to customize solutions that achieve clients’ objectives. Central to our decision-making process, both at the security and portfolio level, is a total return analysis, which incorporates our assessment of interest rate trends, yield curve expectations and credit spreads. Each of BNY Asset Management’s active fixed-income strategies can be customized according to client mandates.

• Limited Duration  -- Seeks to preserve principal and minimize interest rate sensitivity by investing in bonds with relatively short durations.
• Intermediate Aggregate  -- Seeks to generate a relatively high level of total return without the heightened interest rate volatility and credit risk associated with longer term bonds.
• Core Fixed Income  -- Provides broad exposure to the U.S. fixed-income market, including government, agency and corporate bonds from across the maturity spectrum.
• High Yield Bond  -- Seeks to generate attractive risk-adjusted total returns by investing in a diversified portfolio of below-investment grade bonds. We utilize a disciplined approach and bottom-up analysis within a top-down framework that examines broad economic, political and social trends and then extrapolates that analysis down to the issuer level.
• Global Fixed Income  -- Seeks to access income-generating opportunities in the U.S. and globally. Global fixed income offers new income-generating prospects and provides valuable portfolio diversification opportunities.
• Global Currency Investment  -- By treating currency as an independent asset class with low correlations to other benchmark strategies, such as the S&P 500, MSCI Global Equities and Lehman U.S. Aggregate Index, the strategy seeks to be either a source of portable alpha (described below) or a stand-alone portfolio.
• Global Portable Alpha  -- A highly diversified portfolio of global fixed-income and currency investments, which seeks to generate strong, consistent returns that exhibit low correlation to other asset classes. This strategy can be structured as a portfolio overlay to enhance core returns or as a total return strategy.
• Total Asset Liability Solutions (ToTALS^SM) -- BNY Asset Management offers ToTALS, a refined fixed-income strategy that seeks to more closely match assets and liabilities, ToTALS is offered as a potential solution to help close the asset/liability gaps in institutional pension plan funding.
• Nuclear Decommissioning Trusts (NDTs) Management -- BNY Asset Management has been a pioneer in the management of NDTs. We provide a variety of fixed-income strategies that can help ensure adequate funding levels for the decommissioning of nuclear power plants.
• SRI Fixed Income  -- BNY Asset Management applies a series of social screens to fixed-income securities, creating portfolios that can be benchmarked against key bond market indices such as the Lehman Brothers U.S. Aggregate Bond Index. In building socially responsible portfolios, BNY Asset Management takes the time to learn each client’s social values and concerns, structuring a portfolio according to those values and concerns. We apply a single or a series of social screens. 

Passive Fixed Income
BNY Asset Management offers passively managed fixed-income strategies that track a wide variety of benchmark bond indices. Through comprehensive research and stratified sampling, BNY Asset Management’s fixed-income index strategies are an attempt to manage return, risk and portfolio characteristics in a way that is almost identical to that of a specified benchmark index.

• Aggregate Index  -- Tracks the Lehman Brothers U.S. Aggregate Bond Index, which is a benchmark of the taxable U.S. bond market, and seeks to provide a total return comparable to that of the index.
• Government/Credit Index -- Tracks the Lehman Brothers U.S. Government/Credit Index -- comprised of government and corporate bonds -- and seeks to provide a total return comparable to that of the index.
• Intermediate Government/Credit Index  --Tracks the Lehman Brothers U.S. Intermediate Government/Credit Index and seeks to provide a total return comparable to that of the index.
• ETF Sub-Advisory --  BNY acts as a sub-advisor to a variety of ETF fund families.