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There’s a London whale, a Euro zone crisis, and persistent, if nonsensical, chatter about a bond bubble. Yet in an effort to find some measure of safety and — one can hope — income, investors have poured $882 billion into bonds since January 2009, driving prices and stress levels up and yields and expectations lower.

All this economic and political strife is making the bond market harder to navigate than ever. Most fixed-income managers will tell you it’s the toughest they’ve seen. Every new headline brings a risk on or risk off shift, with negative headlines sending investors into Treasury bonds and other safer instruments (risk off), and any bit of good news sending investors back into corporate bonds, high-yield or other riskier investments (risk on).

In short, the bond market is a mess, and it’s harder than ever to make sense of it. One way to do so is to study how some of the largest and most successful bond-investment firms are navigating these treacherous waters.

Fixed-income investing benefits from economies of scale, research, trading opportunities, research, derivative usage, and research—all of which is true of stock investing, only more so here. Scott Roberts for Barron’s

These firms also have much in common. All are located far from Wall Street, and visits to each of their offices demonstrate highly collaborative and social behavior inside a somewhat isolationist firm. Each values a distinct corporate culture that many employees have grown up in — an astounding number of people at each firm measure their tenure in decades. And each company is known for active management.

As in any area of money management, there is no single right approach. But it is important to understand what your manager is doing.

You can’t talk about bonds without talking about Pimco. The firm, which manages some $1.8 trillion in total, long has been known for its macroeconomic perspective on, well, pretty much everything. And that exhaustive macroeconomic research informs every investment decision.

Pimco’s two leaders and front-men need little introduction, so we’ll dispense with it quickly. Bill Gross founded the Newport Beach, Calif.-based firm in 1971, and currently serves as co-chief investment officer and manager of the flagship Pimco Total Return fund (PTTAX), which, with $263 billion in assets, is also the world’s largest mutual fund. He’s also a member of the Barron’s Roundtable. Sharing the spotlight at Pimco is Mohamed El-Erian, chief executive and co-CIO with Gross. He’s been with the firm since 1999, save for a two-year stint managing Harvard University’s endowment. Before that, he spent 15 years with the International Monetary Fund.