Fixed-income guru and DoubleLine CEO Jeffrey Gundlach has teamed with Nobel Prize winner and Yale economist Robert Shiller to launch a new mutual fund: The DoubleLine Shiller Enhanced CAPE Fund, based on sector selectivity and Shiller's cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings ratio (CAPE).
But it's not your "plain vanilla" CAPE fund—a la the Barclays ETN+Shiller CAPE ETN (CAPE), which began trading a year ago.
As the two financial experts described on a webinar late Thursday, the fund not only buys equity index futures of the four undervalued market sectors, it also uses some assets to build a fixed-income collateral portfolio.
The two experts say Barclays Bank approached them about work on the value-oriented product. "We looked into it … and we became convinced that there was an interesting idea here," said Gundlach.
"It's put together using a total-return swap," Gundlach said of the fixed-income side of the fund. "Our goal [with the fixed-income holdings] is to outperform cash."
Both strategies, he says, are value plays on their respective markets (and indexes). "There is sort-of a double value proposition, not just from a philosophical standpoint but from a total-return standpoint," the DoubleLine executive said. "The ups and downs of the fund's price will be driven very largely by beta in the equity market."
"We are excited about this," Gundlach said, because it complements DoubleLine's existing equity products with a value twist and is not actively managed.
"We think it's a better mousetrap," he said, pointing to the fact that using CAPE as an investment strategy has shown lower volatility and a higher rate of return over time. Hopefully, the fixed-income expert says, it will result in "a tastes great, less filling type of investment experience."
