A sound investment process and strong management team underpin BlackRock Total Return ETF's Morningstar Medalist Rating of Gold. The portfolio maintains a cost advantage over competitors, priced within the cheapest fee quintile among peers.  

 The strategy merits a High Process Pillar rating. The strategy’s management team earns a High People Pillar rating. The strategy's parent organization earns the firm an Above Average Parent Pillar rating. People, Process and Parent Pillar ratings for this strategy are indirectly assigned by a Morningstar analyst rather than algorithmically derived. Please see the notes following each pillar section for more details. The details of assigning methods can be found in each pillar section.

Analyst Rating

iShares JP Morgan USD Emerging Markets Bond ETF

Strong execution supports a High Process Pillar rating.
Rick Rieder and his colleagues determine the top-down elements of the strategy using an in-house ‎framework emphasizing broad trends that will, in their view, typically last between two and four ‎quarters, such as synchronized global growth. They favor asymmetric situations in which the ‎probability of outcomes appears skewed, with some more likely to develop than others; they want to ‎bet on the more likely ones.‎
Once the managers have determined their primary themes, they farm out security selection and ‎implementation to sector teams. They also use data from BlackRock’s Aladdin system to decompose ‎risks in a variety of ways, and the team aims to maintain balance among them to avoid having any ‎single bet overwhelm the portfolio.‎
The strategy is a core-plus offering, meaning it can go beyond its Bloomberg U.S. Aggregate Bond ‎Index benchmark into below-investment-grade and emerging-markets debt, for example, and its generic prospectus risk-control guardrails give the managers flexibility. They have historically maintained the strategy’s ‎high-yield and emerging-markets exposure below 9% each, despite having more flexibility.‎

Note: The Process Pillar rating and analysis are indirectly assigned by an analyst. When an analyst covers a vehicle that follows a given strategy (as codified by Morningstar’s StrategyID data point) Morningstar maps the covered vehicle’s Process Pillar to any other uncovered vehicles that follow the same strategy (that is, share the same StrategyID). This ensures that the analyst’s view is leveraged whenever available and promotes consistency when assigning Process Pillar ratings to vehicles that follow the same strategy.

High

Process

This is one of the most well-staffed teams in the industry. CIO Rick Rieder’s priority after pure investment work is the identification and acquisition ‎of investment talent, building out the group responsible for this ‎and offerings with related mandates. That has meant the mentorship of a strong team, including David ‎Rogal, a 16-year BlackRock veteran named on this portfolio in 2017, and Chi Chen, who has been at the ‎firm for more than 10 years and named here in October 2022. She was added to the strategy several months before the retirement of comanager Bob Miller in early 2023. 
That continuity should make the most of BlackRock’s deep resources to synthesize macroeconomic ‎and bottom-up research. In particular, the team looks to identify big trends affecting markets and ‎position the portfolio accordingly. This can be more art than science, but Rieder is a voracious ‎consumer of data and labors to synthesize large amounts of information into actionable themes.‎
The team taps into BlackRock’s well-staffed and global fixed-income platform. With close to 500 fixed-‎income investment professionals across the globe, few peers can compete with the resources at this ‎team’s disposal. The strategy has two dedicated risk-management specialists but is also indirectly ‎supported by a vast organization dedicated to maintaining Aladdin, BlackRock’s flagship risk and ‎portfolio management system.‎

Note: The People Pillar rating and analysis are indirectly assigned by an analyst. When an analyst covers a vehicle that follows a given strategy (as codified by Morningstar’s StrategyID data point), Morningstar maps the covered vehicle’s People Pillar ratings to any other uncovered vehicles that follow the same strategy (that is, share the same StrategyID). This ensures that the analyst’s view is leveraged whenever available and promotes consistency when assigning People Pillar ratings to vehicles that follow the same strategy.

People

BlackRock offers compelling options across asset classes and vehicles. It earns an Above Average rating for Parent. 
The firm’s approximately USD 8 trillion in assets under management, as of Sept. 30, 2022, gives it unparalleled scale and influence. It is a market-leading index fund provider globally, and its iShares exchange-traded fund franchise offers a low-cost lineup of core funds that investors can use to build a well-diversified portfolio for dirt cheap. The firm can be more adventurous in its ETF launches than some peers, so not everything it launches is appropriate for the masses. As a result, it is likely to have more ETF closures than peers that stick to the basic building blocks.  
The firm’s active fixed-income and multi-asset efforts also stand out as some of the best in the industry. Those benefit from BlackRock’s commitment to building a first-class risk management system via its Aladdin analytics software. The software is also available for sale to other firms and has proved to be a popular option for competitors, a testament to its usefulness. 
More recently, the firm has shifted its focus to ESG offerings and incorporating ESG across its investment lineup, leading to a political backlash in the United States.
BlackRock isn’t the best at everything it tries to do, but retail investors, financial advisors, and large institutions could all build robust portfolios using BlackRock’s products.

Above Average

Parent

BlackRock Total Return ETF

BRTR is an actively managed ETF that broadly invests in corporate and government fixed income securities from around the world. Securities could be of any maturity while limiting investments in junk bonds to 20%.

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BlackRock has listed the BlackRock Total Return ETF (BRTR) on the Nasdaq. The actively managed ETF seeks alpha opportunities across the fixed income universe.

BlackRock Launches Active Total Return ETF BRTR

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today, BlackRock launched the BlackRock Total Return ETF (Nasdaq: BRTR), providing ETF investors with access to the firm's Total Return strategy. As a diversified core bond strategy, the ETF seeks to uncover alpha opportunities across the fixed income universe and deliver consistent, attractive returns across all market cycles.1 This launch reinforces BlackRock's commitment to delivering liquidity, tax efficiency, and alpha in the convenience of an ETF. Managed by Ric.

News for BlackRock Total Return ETF ETF (BRTR)