Given the relative popularity of bonds as displayed by the Morningstar data above, we thought a peek at how allocators with income as a priority are viewing the asset class may be in order.
Over the past year, the average allocation has been rising markedly, and now sits at 35 per cent, having been 31 per cent a year ago.
In many respects, this reflects a wider trend: fixed income allocations have also been going up in growth portfolios recently - rising from about 24 per cent a year ago to 28 per cent now.
Even in ESG investing - where fixed income allocations have typically proven trickier needles to thread - there has been an increase, with the average allocation in portfolios nudging up slightly from just below 28 per cent to just above 29 per cent.
The asset classes which drove the increase in income portfolios have been government bonds, where average allocations have gone up from 5 per cent to 7 per cent, and strategic bond funds, where average allocations have gone from 3.88 per cent to 6 per cent.
The house with the largest allocation to bonds in their income portfolio, and skewing the average meaningfully is Invesco, which has a stonking 62 per cent allocation. Next up is Rathbones at 46 per cent, an increase of 3 per cent over the past quarter.
That Invesco allocation also represents an increase on the previous quarter, where its fixed income allocation stood at 58 per cent.
At the other end of the distribution, Wise has just 14 per cent of the capital in its income portfolio allocated to the fixed income asset class, while Brooks Macdonald has 20 per cent.
Yorkshire-based (not that they like to mention it much) DFM RSMR have been in touch to confirm that they are another firm with an allocation considerably below the mean, with 26 per cent in fixed income.
Instead they are overweight cash relative to the peer group with their 7 per cent allocation - more than twice the average, while their equity allocation, at 48 per cent, is precisely in line with the peer group of income portfolios we monitor.
