Jeff Klingelhofer, CFA, Managing Director, Portfolio Manager & Senior Research Analyst, Securitized Assets at Aristotle Pacific didn’t set out to be a bond guy but a launchpad at PIMCO, stops in Tokyo and London, and a Chicago MBA detour into a scrappy five-person hedge fund rewired how he thinks about fixed income. The internship stuck, with Klingelhofer building out Thornburg’s taxable fixed income desk from employee #3 to Head of Investments, before joining Aristotle Pacific in 2024. The firm is a 15-year-old franchise (formerly Pacific Asset Management) now running roughly $16 billion and, as of July 30, three brand-new ETFs: the Aristotle Core Plus Income ETF (ARCP), the Aristotle Multi-Sector Income ETF (ARMS), and the Aristotle Short Term Income ETF (SDUR).
The pitch isn’t about taking on more risk to boost returns but about capturing returns with minimal risk, and that means shopping across every fixed income silo instead of hunting inside one. Klingelhofer gives the example of February 2020, when American Airlines’ corporate bond and its aircraft-backed EETC both priced at 3.75% with the same issuer, same tenor, same yield. A month later, COVID hit and the corporate bond cratered to 27 cents on the dollar while the EETC held at 65 cents. Same company, wildly different outcomes because Wall Street desks looked at each instrument in isolation instead of comparing across the capital stack. That’s the whole Aristotle Pacific thesis, and it’s why he sees the same mispricing setting up today in data center financing.
The three funds slot into that framework by risk level, with SDUR as a low-duration, active-credit alternative to cash, ARCP as a core-bond upgrade aiming to beat the Agg by 100-150bps, and ARMS as the full relative-value expression targeting 250bps over a cycle with real flexibility to shift credit quality. Macro-wise, Klingelhofer thinks the market is underestimating new Fed Chair Warsh, who, unlike his predecessor, inherits a purely high-inflation world with no disinflationary tailwind. It means the firm is positioning the funds slightly long duration as a hedge against credit risk elsewhere in the book. His closing advice to advisors was a cautionary and practical one, that they shouldn’t expect Aristotle to work in every environment (no fund does), and to pair its bottom-up process with top-down managers like PIMCO so the two zig and zag differently throughout market cycles.
To learn more about Aristotle Pacific, go here, or you can learn more about their new ETFs here.
