Recently crowned as the new bond king by the Wall Street Journal, Vanguard’s Josh Barrickman and his team oversee bond portfolios for the investment giant. After earning his M.B.A. from Lehigh University, John joined Vanguard in 1999 as a municipal bond trader before moving into a role as an index bond trader. In his current role as money manager, he runs the super-low-cost Vanguard Total Bond Market Index Fund with assets totaling $145 billion. The fund recently surpassed PIMCO’s flagship bond fund in terms of total assets.

The fund is particularly popular with retail investors, partly due to the fund having an extremely low expense ratio of 0.20 percent. It has a Lipper rating of 5 for its low expenses, good for a ranking as a Lipper Leader. Returns have been in the middle of the pack, Lipper gives it a rating of 3 for total return over the last five years. Barrickman, like other money managers,  shares his thoughts in a blog post. He shared a favorite investing analogy in a November post:

“Whenever I explain indexing to friends and family, I always fall back on my favorite analogy: the car race. Imagine a race where one car represents the market and is set up in a certain way – with tires, fuel, suspension, and so on – all meeting precise specifications. The indexer is in another car, and its job is to finish in a dead heat with the market car.”

Barrickman and his team oversee 30 bond index funds and 20 ETFs for Valley Forge-based Vanguard. The firm offers a selection of incredibly successful ETFs, some of which are a part of the Total Bond Market Index Fund and account for $28 billion of its total assets. “Our ETFs and index funds are really interchangeable,” he explained.

The fund additionally differentiates itself from competitors by doing things differently. “We remove from our investment universe the holdings of the Federal Reserve of mortgages. We’re a little less exposed to mortgages. That’s a best practice, in our view,” he said. Barrickman noted that he and his team have a specific mandate – “Our mandate is to deliver the return of the benchmark.”

If you’re hungry for more Vanguard news, check out our story on Vanguard CEO’s visit to Delaware County Community College students.