The top five holdings in this fund are: Microsoft Corp (MSFT, 2.78% of assets); Amazon.com Inc (AMZN, 1.97%); Apple Inc (AAPL, 1.92%); Alphabet Inc Class C (GOOG, 1.39%); and United States Treasury Notes 1.25%, 1.32%.
Fidelity Balanced Fund (FBALX)
From Moneyletter
Fidelity Balanced Fund’s (FBALX) “neutral” allocation is 60% stocks and 40% bonds. But lead manager Robert Stansky has the ability to vary the fund’s allocation by up to 10%. And since 2013, he has kept the equity portion close to the 70% maximum (recently 69%).
Within the equity sleeve, Stansky chooses the managers for all sectors, and will swap out managers if performance is not satisfactory. Sector weightings, however, are kept in line with that of the S&P 500. Hence, information technology is the lead sector in the stock portfolio, accounting for 18.8% of assets, followed by health care, financials, consumer discretionary, and industrials (14.0% to 10.2% of assets). About 5% of assets are invested in foreign stocks.
Ford O’Neil has headed the fixed-income side since mid-2015, and runs it in the same manner as Fidelity Total Bond (which he also manages). He avoids big interest rate bets, but does set the portfolio’s yield curve and sector exposure based on a macro framework. More than half of
bond assets are in US Government debt, with the next largest exposure by quality being in the A/BBB range.
Looking at fund performance, Fidelity Balanced has generally been well within the top half of the Morningstar asset allocation category in performance for the past decade. In 2019, through August 2, its 14.8% return bests more than 90% of its peers.
Brian W. Kelly, Moneyletter, www.moneyletter.com, 800-890-9670, August 2019