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

Hi, and welcome to the Longview. I'm Christine Ben's Director of Personal Finance and Retirement Planning for Morningstar.

And I'm Amy Arnaud, portfolio strategist for Morningstar.

Our guest on the podcast today is Lyle Fitterer, a senior portfolio manager and co-lead on the

municipal bond sector for Baird advisors. He has 36 years of experience managing bond portfolios.

Prior to joining Baird in 2019, he served as the co-head of Global Fixed Income and the head of

the municipal fixed income team at Wells Fargo Asset Management.

Lyle obtained his undergraduate degree in accounting from the University of North Dakota,

here in the chartered financial analyst designation in 1996, and is currently a member of the

CFA Institute and the CFA Society of Milwaukee. Lyle, welcome to the Longview. Thanks for having me,

Christine. Thank you so much for being here. We wanted to harness your expertise in the

municipal bond space today and talk about the Muni Market, which may be less familiar to some of

our listeners. It's a massive market, and we hear terms like fragmented

and opaque to describe it. There are a lot of issuers and more than a million bonds. Can you talk

about how the team there at Baird tackles investigating so many different municipal bonds on offer

and doing your due diligence?

Sure, and that's a great question. You know, you're right. It is a large market,

but, you know, from a size perspective, much smaller than the broader taxable market. So we like to think of it as a, you know, a smaller pool, but with a lot more efficient. And so, you know, in terms of

success, we think it's one of the most inefficient markets out there. So the ability to add

alpha as an active manager, we think, is enhanced because of that. So when we think about the market

and how we go about tackling it, you know, our team is eight people, which, you know, a lot

of times will get to question, well, how do, you know, eight people, how do they cover the entire market? And there's, you know, really the answer to that, I think, is a couple of things. But the biggest one is, you know, through the use of technology. So when Dwayne McAllister and Eric and Joe, which where two other people he was working with at BMO,

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