Another top Pimco investing exec is saying goodbye.

Less than a week after Neel KashKari announced his planned departure to pursue a life in California politics, Pimco's head of mortgage-backed and asset-backed investing, Scott Simon, has declared that he will retire in May to focus on "my life and my wife," according to Bloomberg, and Reuters.

Bloomberg notes that mortgage debt is the largest holding of Pimco’s $285-billion Total Return Fund, after the firm last year repeated a successful bet from 2008 that the Federal Reserve would buy government-backed home-loan securities to boost the economy. The fund, managed by Bill Gross, was 42 percent invested in mortgages last month, according to information posed on its website. It returned 9.48 percent over the past year to beat 93 percent of competitors, according to Bloomberg data.

Moreover, the newswire reports that Michael Cudzil, who joined Pimco from Nomura Securities International last year, will replace Simon as the co-manager of two mortgage-related funds, the Pimco GNMA Fund and Pimco Mortgage-Backed Securities Fund, according to a regulatory filing by the firm.

Meanwhile, Reuters says that Simon's uncanny bets in mortgage-backed securities have helped PIMCO, which oversees $1.92 trillion in assets, turn 2012 into one of its most successful years in investing. 

Edited by: Tommy Fernandez


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