At just 44, Nick Maroutsos has one of the most elite jobs in money management: the head of global bonds at Janus Henderson Investors, a firm that oversees some $400 billion.
But he’s walking away from it in October to consider his second act and hit the road for cross-country trips with his young children while — as he put it — “they still like me.”
Maroutsos, best known as the successor to former bond king Bill Gross, says he hasn’t quite decided what he’ll do next. But whatever it is, it will involve following his 14-year-old daughter to lacrosse tournaments around the country and spending time with his wife and two other young children.
The bond head is joining the legions of well-off Americans who are casting off the shackles of their day jobs, spurred by a “life-is-short” mentality galvanized by a year of effective hibernation. It’s just one of the unexpected outcomes of the pandemic era, which has empowered some to jettison corporate life.
“I will work again at some point,” he said in a phone interview on Wednesday. “In a year’s time, I will probably resurface in some capacity. I’m looking at things potentially outside of fixed income. But I’m not good enough at other things, like either music or cooking, to do them.”
Maroutsos, who graduated from the University of California San Diego and received a master’s degree from UCLA, first entered the corporate world in 1999 as an analyst and account manager at Pacific Investment Management Co., the bond-investing powerhouse built up by Bill Gross. In 2007, he founded his own fixed-income investment firm, Kapstream Capital, most of which was acquired eight years later by Janus, where Gross worked after Pimco.
In 2019, when Gross retired, Maroutsos and his team mixed Gross’s strategies with some of their own.
The biggest fund that Maroutsos helps oversee is the Janus Henderson Short Duration Income ETF, which has a market capitalization of almost $3 billion and total return of 2.5% since the since pandemic lockdowns started in mid-March 2020. He is also co-manager of the Absolute Return Income Opportunities Fund, which has seen a 2.4% return over the past year.
“I had reached a point in my career where I had been in fixed-income markets for the last 20 years, and was looking at what the future holds,” he says. “I was looking at my own career progress and decided now is as good a time as any to take a step back and hit the reset button.”
“The pandemic has caused everybody to sort of reevaluate not just their career paths, but goals in life,” Maroutsos added. “I spent a lot of time thinking about that and where I want to be in the next 10 years. I’m quite fortunate to be able to do this at my age.”