August 5, 2019 BARRON’S 23
Mutual Funds
TalkingWithMattToms,Manager,Voya
StrategicIncomeOpportunitiesFund
AOne-Trick
PonyWitha
StellarRecord
ByLewisBraham
MATT TOMS, THE MANAGER OF THE VOYA STRATEGIC INCOME
Opportunities fund, loves change—how the daily twists and
turns in the global economy affect bond markets. “Managing
money is very different from engineering, where you get to
build something and know it’s complete,” he says. “This job is
never complete. That’s one of the fun parts about it.”
Yet Toms’ focus on fixed income itself has hardly changed.
He has been a bond investor since earning a business degree
from the University of Michigan 25 years ago. “I’m a one-trick
pony,” says Toms, 47. It’s a pretty neat trick, though. His $2.1
billion fund (ticker: ISIAX)—the A shares of which come with
a 2.5% front-end load—has dominated its peers in Morning-
star’s nontraditional bond category, besting 90% of them in the
past five years with a 4.1% annualized return.
Toms began his career as a corporate bond analyst at Lin-
coln National, then was a global bond portfolio manager at
Northern Trust from 2000 until 2007, and then director of fixed
income at Calamos Investments from 2007 to 2009. After the
financial crisis, ING U.S.—now Voya Financial—presented an
“opportunity to lead a broader asset base and a broader invest-
ment team,” he says. He is now Voya’s chief investment officer
of fixed income, overseeing 160 people and $143 billion in assets.
But Voya Strategic Income Opportunities is Toms’ baby—it
is the money manager’s most flexible bond fund, enabling him
to more fully express his thoughts on fixed-income markets.
Toms saw a need for the fund, which launched in 2012, be-
cause many nontraditional bond fund peers had flexibility but
lacked suitable risk control.
“We looked at the ‘unconstrained’ bond fund space as being
really poorly manufactured,” Toms says. “The products were
highly volatile, with a huge dispersion among managers’ per-
formance and a very low predictability of the return stream.”
The difference with Toms’ fund is that while it can invest
anywhere, it targets a very specific 12-month volatility level of
3% to 4%, which is comparable to the broader bond market, he
Photograph by Peyton Fulford