Municipal Fixed Income Team

Nick Venditti: If you look at traditional buy side muni asset management, they have historically drawn kind of a thick, bold line between credit analysts and portfolio managers. And what that means for you on a day-to-day basis is that if you were to go and ask a credit question to, say, their health care analyst, you would learn lots of interesting things about that hospital. You'd learn lots of uninteresting things about that hospital. But if you asked that analyst where those bonds should trade, they would flub that question. If you ask them how those bonds fit in a portfolio, they would flub that question because analysts are analysts. Similarly, in those environments, portfolio managers are portfolio managers. They look at the market. They are involved in the market. But if you ask them a credit question that goes one layer deeper than anything they can read on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, likely they wouldn't be able to do that, either. What's interesting about that dynamic is that anyone who sits in a chair that kind of looks like mine will tell you that the two most important criteria in building successful municipal bond portfolios are number one, bottom-up fundamental credit research, and number two, some version of relative value. Buying the right bond at the right price at the right time. If those are the two most important characteristics, why would you ever divorce them? At Allspring, what makes us different, what makes us unique is that we spend every day trying to tear down that thick, bold line. Our analysts are intimately involved in the market. They know where bonds trade. They look at bonds, not just from a bottom-up fundamental credit perspective, but also from a relative value perspective. Similarly, our portfolio managers grew up as bottom-up fundamental credit research analysts. So, we try to take those two important factors and marry them every day, which I think helps build successful portfolios.