VettaFi poll: 42% of advisors favor active core bond funds

Forty-two percent of advisors polled during a late-October VettaFi webcast chose an active core bond strategy to rebuild fixed income sleeves, according to ETF Trends' Oct. 26 report on the event.

Seventy-one percent of responding advisors said they were cautiously rebalancing into fixed income, building bond positions incrementally rather than making aggressive allocations. ETF Trends gives no respondent count for either figure, so both describe the advisors who chose to answer the session's polls.

For an advisor comparing an active core fund with an index fund, the two terms that matter are the expense ratio and the manager's duration band. Panelists said market-cap-weighted indexes such as the Bloomberg US Aggregate have become increasingly Treasury-heavy, leaving ETF holders tied to the index less sector-diversified and more exposed to interest rate swings. An active fund hands duration and credit-quality calls to the portfolio team, so the fee buys discretion whose limits are worth checking before it replaces a benchmark-tracking fund.

Samarth Sanghavi, head of fixed income products at TMX VettaFi, described the shift in the article: "The conversation has changed from whether to own bonds to how to own them." He said investment-grade corporates yield north of 5%, that duration is the key risk to manage as the Fed hikes, and that he likes staying intermediate in investment-grade credit paired with floating-rate products in this cycle.

ETF Trends points to the Invesco Total Return Bond ETF (GTO) as "a strong example" of the active core approach, citing flexible duration and exposure across securitized debt, corporates and government bonds. Matt Brill, Invesco's head of North America investment grade credit, said in the article that yields remain attractive across high-quality fixed income and that investors don't have to reach aggressively for risk to generate meaningful income.

The rebalancing has a stated catalyst: ETF Trends reports that U.S. and international equity benchmarks posted a remarkably strong first nine months of 2026, and that advisors were planning to take some profits and lock in multiyear high yields across fixed income. The session's panel featured market leaders from State Street Investment Management, Janus Henderson and Horizon. State Street launched four full-weight sector SPDR ETFs at a 0.12% annual fee in October, as ETF Daily previously reported.