The Battle of the Bond Benchmarks

TOKYO – Some prominent institutional bond investors are shifting their focus from traditional benchmark indices, which weight countries’ debt issues by market capitalization, toward GDP-weighted indices. PIMCO, one of the world’s largest fixed-income investment firms, and the Government Pension Fund of Norway, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, have both recently made moves in this direction. But there is a risk that some investors could lose sight of the purposes of a benchmark index.