Downtown Josh Brown, the financial Twitterati's favorite Reformed Broker, is at it again, stirring up trouble this time by comparing TCW Total Return Bond Fund CIO Tad Rivelle's attempt to revive the fund with Axl Rose's sad attempt to breathe new life into his old Guns n' Roses band.
The problem, says Brown in a March 27 blog post, is that Rivelle and Rose both faced the unenviable task of launching a convincing comeback without the talent that had made them successful in the first place.
For Rose, that meant recording a $13 million album that flopped because new band members brought in to replace Izzy Stradlin, the co-writer of such hits as Sweet Child O' Mine and Paradise City, just couldn't come up with the creative goods. And for TCW, that meant "lying by omission" when management didn't come clean about how the Lipper award-winning fund's stellar results were actually generated by Jeffrey Gundlach and his team, about 30 of whom departed TCW in December 2009 and went off to form DoubleLine (with lawsuits to follow).
The reason for his blog post, Brown says, is that he's simply pointing out a dimension of performance research that often gets overlooked by investors who are "chasing the hot dot."
