Bill H. Gross

William Hunt "Bill" Gross (born April 13, 1944) is an American investor and fund manager, best known for co-founding Pacific Investment Management Co.

PIMCO is a global fixed income investment company.

He moved with his parents to San Francisco in 1954.

Gross graduated from Duke University in 1966 as an Angier B. Duke Scholar, and with a degree in psychology.

At Duke, he joined Phi Kappa Psi.

He then served in the Navy from 1966 to 1969 as an assistant chief engineer aboard the USS Diachenko, leading several sorties of SEALs to landing sites along the coast of Vietnam.

In 1968, he married Pamela Roberts.

They had two children: Jeff and Jennifer.

They later divorced.

He left the Navy in 1970 with the Tet combat and Vietnam active service ribbons.

Gross earned an MBA from the UCLA Anderson School of Management in 1971.

Gross briefly played blackjack professionally in Las Vegas, Nevada, and has said that he applies many of his gambling methods for spreading risk and calculating odds to his investment decisions.

Gross is a CFA Charterholder, who earned his credentials while working as an investment analyst for Pacific Mutual Life between 1971 and 1976.

Nicknamed the "Bond King", Gross managed one of the world's largest mutual funds, focusing mostly on bonds and fixed income investments.

In 1985, he married Sue J. Frank; they have one son, Nick.

Ben Trosky, who created and ran Pimco's high-yield bond business from the 1990s through the early 2000s, told Barron's that Gross was, "a good trader, a good analyst, and a good salesman, able to distill complex ideas into something simple and accessible."

In the 1990s he authored two popular-market books on investing, Bill Gross on Investing and Everything You've Heard About Investing is Wrong! In September 2008, by holding large positions in agency-backed mortgage bonds of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Gross's funds netted U.S. $1.7 billion after the federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Gross was able to beat the market for much of his career by exploiting the element of certainty, and mastering the element of uncertainty, according to a 2002 Fortune story, "The Bond King".

Certainty for a bond investor like Gross included variables, such as credit ratings, yields, maturities, and duration, a measure of risk.

The longer a bond's duration, the more wildly its price fluctuates when rates change, with cautious investors choosing shorter-term durations to limit price volatility caused by interest rate changes.

Gross took advantage of uncertainty by making educated – but accurate – guesses on the direction of interest rates, inflation and other variables that affect bonds.

At Pimco, Gross controlled more bond money than anyone in the world, and he advised the Treasury on the role of subprime mortgage bonds during the 2008 financial crisis.

Following the collapse of Wall Street in 2008, Gross emerged as one of the nation's most influential financiers, and became among the most fervent supporters of the Obama administration's strategy (the Public-Private Investment Program, or P.P.I.P.) to enlist private investors to help bail out the nation's ailing banks and try to revive the economy.

It was widely reported that the departure of Pimco chief executive Mohamed El-Erian was triggered by conflict with Gross.

In naming Gross the Fund Manager of the Decade for fixed income in 2010, Morningstar said: "No other fund manager made more money for people than Bill Gross."

He was known for his ability to identify and exploit inefficiencies in markets, and for adjusting his strategies as Pimco grew, from embracing new technologies, to derivatives and the internet.

Gross ran their $270 billion Total Return Fund (PTTRX), before leaving to join Janus Capital Group (now Janus Henderson) in September 2014.

Gross was born in Middletown, Ohio, the son of Shirley ( Tait), a homemaker, and Sewell Mark Gross, a sales executive for AK Steel Holding.

Part of his family is originally from Winnipeg, Canada.

He was raised a Presbyterian.

Called "the nation's most prominent bond investor" by The New York Times, he co-founded Pacific Investment Management (PIMCO) and managed PIMCO's Total Return fund (once the world's largest bond fund with almost $293 billion in assets) and several smaller ones until his departure in September 2014.

Gross himself left late in the fall of 2014, and in October 2015 sued Pimco and parent company Allianz for "hundreds of millions of dollars," claiming that he had been pushed out by a "cabal" of executives "Driven by a lust for power, greed, and a desire to improve their own financial position and reputation at the expense of investors and decency," calling them out for "improper, dishonest, and unethical behavior".

Pimco settled with Gross in March 2017 for a reported $81 million, all of which Gross pledged to donate to charity.

In 2018, they were involved in a contentious divorce.

Both own homes in Laguna Beach, California.

In 2019, Gross revealed his Asperger syndrome diagnosis.

The Financial Times wrote in March 2019: "Active, aggressive bond investing was Gross' big innovation. Historically, insurers and pension funds were the big buyers of bonds. They rarely traded — in fact bonds were typically kept in a vault, and selling meant physically mailing them to the buyer — and enjoyed cordial, clubby relationships with Wall Street. Pimco, on the other hand, actively traded in and out of positions, expanded assertively into hot new areas like junk bonds and emerging markets, and used its increasing clout to cudgel banks into giving them better bids."

He announced his retirement from Janus Henderson Investors and active fund management in February 2019.

He said at the time that he would focus on managing his personal assets and private charitable foundation, the $390 million-asset William, Jeff and Jennifer Gross Family Foundation.

Gross has been married three times.