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It’s time to re-think your fixed income allocation

After decades of historically low yields, investors have been underweight duration and many took on more risk to reach return objectives. With the move higher in rates, fixed income can again provide ballast for a portfolio and investors are revisiting underweights. It’s time to re-assess what’s inside your fixed income allocation.

High risk-adjusted alpha in all market conditions

Analysing and capturing return opportunities takes skill, insight, and experience. We have all three. Our comprehensive fixed income platform has been innovating and anticipating changing client needs for over three decades.

$2.8
$2.8 trillion USD Fixed income assets under management.1
800
800+ investors2 partnered with to help solve their portfolio challenges
24
24-hour global trading platform leverages local knowledge and sector expertise

1 Source: BlackRock 2023 annual Report. BlackRock assets are as of 31 December 2023. 
2 Source: BlackRock Portfolio Analysis and Solutions, from January 2018 – May 2021.

A whole portfolio approach

With the hunt for income more challenging than ever, investors need to consider a broad range of opportunities. Our whole portfolio approach involves blending active and index strategies – with a focus on the front end of the yield curve.

Explore our main fixed income investment strategies

Fixed Income Risks: Two main risks related to fixed income investing are interest rate risk and credit risk. Typically, when interest rates rise, there is a corresponding decline in the market value of bonds. Credit risk refers to the possibility that the issuer of the bond will not be able to repay the principal and make interest payments.

Fundamental Systematic Credit alternatives Index Investing and ETFs Credit
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Fundamental investing at BlackRock

We leverage a rigorous fundamentally-driven approach that seeks to employ the best ideas across our BlackRock fixed income platform.

Our team strategically allocates between the three alpha sources: top-down sector allocation, bottom-up security selection, and macro duration/yield curve positioning.

Systematic fixed income

Systematic fixed income strategies employ unique data-driven insights backed by disciplined risk controls that seek to deliver differentiated portfolio outcomes to investors.
Credit
Differentiated, defensive exposure to various credit benchmarks in both Investment Grade and High Yield.
Factors
Targeted exposures to broad and persistent drivers of return, to help improve portfolio outcomes, enhance diversification and reduce volatility.
Multi-sector
Alpha-seeking strategies that use a consistent, repeatable process to validate fundamental insights with quantitative research.
Liquid alternatives
Employ our best ideas using multiple, independent and risk-controlled alpha models, seeking attractive risk-adjusted returns with low correlations to broad asset classes.
Hedge funds
Uncover alpha using relative value, directional and security selection strategies, across fixed income markets, with return profiles independent of traditional market betas.

Credit alternatives

We bring our global investment expertise and established history across public and private markets to construct holistic credit portfolios for our clients. Clients benefit from our powerful sourcing network and resources in risk management that enable us to access credit investment solutions across the spectrum of risk, liquidity and geography.

Index investing at BlackRock

Our approach to index investing is anything but passive. Extracting every unit of return for a given amount of risk is crucial, and barbelling of asset allocation across index and more complex alphas such as private markets is a trend that continues to deepen.

For over 50 years, our index platform has provided clients with beta exposure across a broad range of sectors and credit qualities. Institutional clients employ index investing strategies to help achieve a variety of goals including reducing portfolio volatility, creating liquidity sleeves and reducing plan investment costs.

Global credit platform

In periods of economic uncertainty where risks remain high and markets volatile, achieving superior risk-adjusted results through the credit cycle requires a partner like BlackRock. Our global credit platform offers a one-stop across three pillars – leveraged finance, multi-strategy credit, and private credit.

Powered by a global platform
We combine global resources with local expertise to drive analysis and decisions that capture opportunities for attractive returns and increased resiliency.

Expertise and a breadth of resources
Our scale, deep networks in liquid and illiquid markets, macro market insights and risk monitoring provide a breadth of global resources not commonly found in credit boutiques.

Amplified with analytics and technology
Market-leading analytics and technology capabilities drive our information edge, empowering greater transparency and better investment decisions.