Today, we share our nominees for the 2025 Morningstar Awards for Investing Excellence: Outstanding Fixed Income Portfolio Manager.
- Richard D. Figuly, J.P. Morgan
- Bryan C. Krug, Artisan
- Ford E. O’Neil, Fidelity
We selected the nominees from investment strategies that earn Morningstar Medalist Ratings of Gold or Silver for at least one vehicle or share class. Long, impressive track records, well-ordered but still adaptable philosophies and processes, and a willingness to put investors’ interests above their own distinguish them. All three are worthy of recognition, but Morningstar will announce one winner later this month.
Here is what sets each nominee apart.
Richard D. Figuly
Richard Figuly and his fellow Columbus, Ohio-based portfolio managers Justin Rucker, Andrew Melchiorre, and Edward Fitzpatrick aren’t household names, but they should be for serving investors well in overseeing flagship JPMorgan Core Bond JCBUX.
Figuly’s industry experience extends far beyond his mid-September 2015 start as lead manager on this strategy. He joined J.P. Morgan in 1993 and has helped run portfolios since 2002, apart from taking a year off in 2004 to serve in the Middle East as a major in the Ohio Army National Guard. Rucker, who has expertise in longer-duration assets, or those with greater interest rate sensitivity, joined the strategy in 2019 and has more than two decades of experience. Securitized specialist Melchiorre and interest rates expert Fitzpatrick both came aboard in May 2023 as part of the firm’s efforts to ensure strong management here for decades to come.
The team excels at bond-picking among high-quality issues, especially within the strategy’s substantial securitized allocation, which is a mix of agency mortgage-backed securities, collateralized mortgage obligations, commercial MBS, and asset-backed securities. An emphasis on diversification and predictability with a focus on bonds whose prices rise more in falling yield environments than they decrease in rising ones (a feature called positive convexity) has helped this strategy outperform when bond prices rally and hold up when they falter.
The strategy’s approach has led to strong results over Figuly’s nearly 10-year tenure, including in stress periods like what proved to be the worst US investment-grade bond market since modern indexing began nearly 50 years ago. When the Morningstar US Core Bond Index lost 18.4% cumulatively peak to trough between Aug. 7, 2020, and Oct. 24, 2022, the 15.9% drop of the fund’s R6 shares was 2.5 percentage points better and beat 80% of distinct intermediate core-bond Morningstar Category peers.
Bryan C. Krug
Bryan C. Krug, CFA, has distinguished himself as one of the most capable managers in the high-yield bond category. He has done this not once, but twice.
Krug started his career in the late 1990s as an analyst on a distressed debt portfolio before joining Kansas City-based Waddell & Reed in 2001. By February 2006, Krug was running what was then called Ivy High Income IVHIX. (In 2021, the Macquarie Group acquired Waddell & Reed and in 2024 renamed this fund Macquarie High Income.) On that fund, he honed his aggressive but effective style, which uses a lean but talented supporting cast of analysts.
Krug focuses on high-yield corporate bonds but has made consistent use of bank loans as well. He and his team conduct rigorous research on individual companies. They prefer asset-light businesses that carry lower credit ratings but generate substantial cash flow and require less capital reinvestment. More traditional hard-asset companies still play a role, but Krug prefers to buy them during periods of dislocation rather than hold them through a full market cycle. The portfolio is concentrated, typically housing one-third of assets in its largest 10 issuers.
That style led to phenomenal investment success with Ivy High Income but also a torrent of inflows. Taking in $7 billion in his final three years, the third most in the category, the fund’s asset base grew to $10 billion, making it increasingly challenging to run in the same fashion as new money continued flowing in.
So, Krug left Waddell & Reed in late 2013 and started over at Artisan. The firm launched Artisan High Income APHFX for him in March 2014, and Krug picked up where he left off. He has once again achieved outstanding results and has helped grow its asset base as of mid-2025 to nearly $10 billion. But this time, the firm made the shareholder-friendly decision to close the fund to new investors back in 2021, which gives Krug and his team a good shot to continue executing at levels consistent with their history.
That history proves all the more remarkable when one splices together the records of Krug’s prior charge and his current one. From early 2006 to late 2013 and early 2014 through May 2025, the two strategies combined under Krug have turned an initial $10,000 investment into nearly $42,000—first in the entire category, about $2,500 more than the second-best competitor, and $9,500 more than the Morningstar High Yield Bond Index.
Ford E. O’Neil
Fidelity veteran Ford O’Neil is no stranger to Morningstar accolades. He won the award formerly known as Morningstar Fixed-Income Manager of the Year in 2016 and was one of three nominees across all asset classes for our 2024 Morningstar Awards for Investing Excellence: Outstanding Portfolio Manager.
O’Neil started his career in the mid-1980s as an investment banker, and in 1989 he joined Fidelity. He quickly rose through the ranks to portfolio manager and has since had a widespread impact on investors. He is now named on more than 15 different mutual funds and exchange-traded funds that, at last count, held nearly $150 billion in assets.
O’Neil has had lots of help along the way thanks to the team-based approach he helped pioneer at Fidelity. When he has questions on mortgage-backed securities and corporate credits, he can consult the industry-leading experts with whom he comanages the flagship Fidelity Advisor Total Bond FBKWX. It’s the strategy he has overseen the longest, and it holds more assets than any of his other charges. One of those experts, Celso Muñoz, became co-lead manager with O’Neil in October 2022.
Under O’Neil and now Muñoz, Fidelity Advisor Total Bond has been a model of consistency. They avoid large interest rate bets and skillfully invest across bond sectors, including different varieties of structured credit. That’s led the fund to beat the intermediate core-plus bond peer norm and the Morningstar Core Plus Bond Index in many of the calendar years since O’Neil’s December 2004 start, often doing so with less volatility (as measured by standard deviation) and with shallower drawdowns. That was evident between early 2021 and late 2022, for example. When the benchmark cumulatively lost 17.6% peak to trough, the Z shares’ 16.25% fall was 1.39 percentage points better and placed near the peer group’s top quartile.