Please stay tuned for important disclosure information at the conclusion of this episode.

Hi, and welcome to the Longview. I'm Dan Lefkowitz, strategist at Morningstar Indexes.

Our guest this week is our colleague Eric Jacobson. Eric is a senior principal for fixed income

strategies on Morningstar's manager research team. He focuses on a variety of taxable, tax-exempt, and non-traditional

managed strategies. He covers some of the key asset managers. He publishes thought leadership,

and he's a member of the Morningstar medalist ratings committee. Eric joined Morningstar in 1995 as a

closed-end fund analyst and also had a stint on Morningstar indexes, where he helped launch our original

bond benchmark suite. Before Morningstar, Eric worked at Kemper Financial Services. He's also a proud

graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Eric, thanks so much for joining us in the Longview.

So glad to be with you, thanks, Dan. Absolutely. So you recently hit your 30-year, 10-year market

Morningstar, not to age you. And looking forward to getting some historical perspectives, some

reflections, what's changed, what hasn't in fixed income investing in the mutual fund world.

Let's kick off by talking about a paper that you recently published. It feels like something of a

magnum opus. The bond market is fertile

ground for active management. I'm trying not to be offended as an index guy, but maybe you can

just talk about the impetus why you wrote this paper. Well, it's interesting because you know,

you're joking about the index thing, but I was trying to be kind of careful with the title,

because I wasn't trying to say that indexing is not good.

But what brought me to write the paper is that I think over the last several years as stock

investing has become, it's become more and more popular for investors to use indexing on the stock side.

I think a lot of people don't really pay that much attention to bonds.

They don't understand bonds as well. And so there's, I think, in certain circles, this notion

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