Bill Gross, fund manager ofJanus Capital Management LLC, speaks during the Bloomberg InvestSummit in New York, U.S. (Photo: Bloomberg)

(Bloomberg) –Bill Gross isn't just retiring from moneymanagement. He's marking the twilight of an era. Gross,74, announced Monday that he was ending his 47-year career managinginvestments, leaving the daily grind as his Janus Henderson GlobalUnconstrained Bond Fund bleeds assets and barely breaks even afterfees. At Janus, Gross was given the freedom to do anything hewanted, but his fund ended up not doing much of anything.

For investors, his exit comes as the decades-long bull market inbonds, which fueled his success, is waning andinterest rates climb off the post-crisis floor. For the industry,Gross's recent struggles show how hard it's become for individualmanagers to beat the indexes, algorithms and sprawling tradingteams that oversee today's portfolios.

“You don't want to be a soloist, especially not in fixedincome,” Dan Fuss, who runs a bond fund as vice chairman of LoomisSayles & Co., said in a phone interview. “That doesn't work, nomatter how talented you are.”

Influence wielded

Influential individuals such as Jeffrey Gundlach of DoubleLineCapital remain, but in his prime, at Pacific Investment Management Co., Grossmanaged more money than almost anyone, and experts from Wall Streetto the Federal Reserve followed him for market cues. As hisreputation spread, he became such a frequent business TV guest thatPimco installed a studio in the office.

At Pimco's predecessor, Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Co., whichhe joined in 1971, Gross was a pioneer in trading bonds not to buyand hold, but to deal in pursuit of accumulating returns.

“The total return style of investing was very unusual and it wasalmost like the market came around to the way he did things,” saidMorningstar Inc.'s Eric Jacobson.

New beginning

Gross's last few years at Pimco were a struggle, however, andwhen he left, the firm made a point of naming a three-member teamto replace him as head of the flagship Total Return fund. Gross'sswitch in 2014 to what became Janus Henderson Group Plc washeralded as a new beginning, but his unconstrained fund, whichinvested wherever Gross saw opportunity, lagged its rivals.

Even Gross conceded he had difficulty.

“Maybe I should have stuck to total return and been moreconstrained,” Gross told Bloomberg TV on Monday.

Says decision to retire was his own

Even other top-performing managers, such as Gundlach, rely on asupport team for new ideas and risk management. Gundlach startedDoubleLine in 2009 with more than three dozen colleagues from hisformer firm, TCW Group Inc. Gross mostly operated as a one-man bandthe past few years and, at times, admitted he missed the oftentesty matching of wits that underpinned investment decisions atPimco.

Gross's newsletters

Gross built a following through newsletters, starting in the1980s when he wrote a note about Butler Creek, his Ohio boyhoodplayground. His monthly commentaries drew from a range ofinspirations — cartoon characters like Wile E. Coyote, his son'sartificial insemination and his cat Bob.

He issued his final note last March, entitled “Killing EachOther,” using inhumanity as a metaphor to warn investors aboutmarket risks. The letter came out a few weeks before hisunconstrained fund suffered a one-day 3 percent loss on a misplacedbet that rates would converge between German and U.S. bondyields.

Gross was a gambler before he became an investor. He taughthimself blackjack card counting from the book “Beat the Dealer”while recovering from a car accident during college. Aftergraduating from Duke University, he turned $200 into $10,000 overfour months in Las Vegas, raising the tuition for his MBA atUCLA.

Rate bet

Gross conceded last year's outsized rate bet violated theinvesting model he pioneered at Pimco.

“The Total Return concept I developed was developed on theconcept of measured risk-taking,” he said Monday on Bloomberg TV.“It's what I learned in the days of blackjack. You didn't put a loton the table.”

Gross may be a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of a solo staractively pulling investment levers, but there was no mistaking hissuccess.

“For many years and countless investors, Bill Gross was the mostfamous and one of the best-performing bond managers,” said ToddRosenbluth, director of ETF and mutual fund research for CFRA.

Copyright 2019 Bloomberg. All rightsreserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten,or redistributed.