DoubleLine's Jeff Gundlach names deputy CIO as assets reach $100 billion

Bond investor Jeffrey Gundlach named Jeffrey Sherman his deputy chief investment officer as assets at the firm he founded six years ago swelled to $100 billion. Mr. Sherman, 39, who joined DoubleLine at the start in 2009 from TCW, will report directly to Mr. Gundlach, Los Angeles-based DoubleLine said Wednesday in a statement. The promotion adds a new key investment post at DoubleLine, which Mr. Gundlach, 56, built into one of the fastest-growing money managers on the back of top-ranked investing performance and bold market calls. Assets overseen by the firm rose to $100 billion as of May 31. Like Mr. Gundlach, who studied theoretical mathematics, Mr. Sherman is a math-minded investor, overseeing a team that designs quantitative strategies. He and Mr. Gundlach co-manage the $955 million DoubleLine Shiller Enhanced CAPE fund, which combines fixed-income strategies with picking stock sectors through derivatives, using methods devised by Robert Shiller, the Yale University economics professor and Nobel Prize winner. The Shiller Enhanced CAPE fund has had an annualized return of almost 13% since inception in October 2013 and is up 5.5% this year, beating 84% of its Bloomberg peers. Assets in the fund, which was highlighted last month by London-based Risk.net when it named DoubleLine Capital its institutional investor of the year, have more than doubled in the last 12 months. Mr. Sherman was traveling and unavailable to comment, according to Loren Fleckenstein, a DoubleLine analyst. Mr. Sherman also manages the $32 million DoubleLine Strategic Commodity fund, which started last May and is down 7.7% in the past 12 months, outperforming 86% of peers. Mr. Sherman joined DoubleLine in 2009 along with more than 40 former employees of TCW Group, who followed Mr. Gundlach after he was ousted from the money manager. Prior to joining TCW, Mr. Sherman was a statistics and mathematics instructor at both the University of the Pacific and Florida State University, according to DoubleLine's website. He earned a bachelor's degree in applied mathematics from the University of the Pacific and a master's in financial engineering from Claremont Graduate University. The DoubleLine Total Return Bond Fund had May net inflows of $919 million while the DoubleLine Core Fixed Income Fund had net inflows of $375 million, the company said in a separate statement.