01-07-2025
How are fixed income investors responding to market volatility?
Overview
This episode of the Market Dialogues podcast features Joseph Higgins, Head of Multi-Sector Portfolio Management on Nuveen's Global Fixed Income team, in a conversation with Tim O'Brien, Global COO of Pricing at Bloomberg.
The discussion explores how rapid technological advances are reshaping the fixed income landscape, from how investors access and act on market data to the growing role of AI and automation in portfolio management. In the context of volatile markets, Higgins shares his perspective on navigating risk, identifying opportunities in the fixed income space, and adapting investment strategies to a changing environment.
About the series
In focus
Featured insights from this episode of Market Dialogues:
On active portfolio management during periods of volatility
Joseph Higgins: [During periods of volatility] there are sectors or securities that don't trade and remain a bit of an unknown…But generally, those periods are periods of opportunity. We traded actively throughout that period [volatility period in April 2025], [guided by] our fundamental views and a lot of quantitative and proprietary overlays.*
On fixed market opportunities
JH: In terms of an operating methodology—because, as we're all aware, a lot of the tariff elements are not resolved…There are some areas that are more dislocated than others—munis would fold into that [investment opportunities] thematic.
We may have, if inflation increases at the margins, a situation where rates stay [higher] a little bit longer than we otherwise would've thought. That could make leveraged loans attractive, potentially, given that they're floating-rate instruments, and you'd get more yield on those for longer…
The last two that come to mind are the securitized sector, specifically Commercial Mortgage-Backed Securities (CMBS) and Asset-Backed Securities (ABS). While particularly CMBS have rallied enormously, there's still a lot of moving pieces in terms of the expertise needed to underwrite those securities properly and assess risk in markets that are still changing dramatically on a regional and national basis…
On use of AI in fixed income markets
JH: AI is obviously a dynamic and important element of what's going on in finance. We have an official AI policy at Nuveen. We are certainly of the view that while it's unlikely in the near term or intermediate term to impact decision making directly, we would not even attempt to use AI to make an investment decision.