HowardGold

Bloomberg

Jeffrey Gundlach’s DoubleLine Total Return Bond has attracted about $2.5 billion in investor cash this year.

The Great Pimco Soap Opera had its season finale — or maybe series finale — in grand style last Friday.

And if it wasn’t Tony Soprano’s notorious black screen or Walter White’s ultimate revenge fantasy in “Breaking Bad,” it came pretty close.

Legendary bond investor Bill Gross stepped down as chief investment officer at Pimco Investments after 43 years at the firm. He’s had a longer run than “All My Children” or “The Young and the Restless.”

Gross isn’t young anymore, but he sure was restless. He will decamp for Janus Capital JNS, +2.19% a much smaller Denver-based shop whose share price soared as much as 40% on the prospect of all those assets coming its way along with the Bond King.

Bill Gross no longer has an uncanny sense of where the market is going, as he did in his prime.

By some accounts, Gross jumped before he was pushed. Pimco Total Return PTTAX, -0.19% his signature fund, has underperformed for years and investors have been bailing big time over the past 16 months.

But the more Gross’s performance sagged, the more imperious he became, creating turmoil among Pimco’s managers. Even the mellow Mohamed El-Erian threw in the towel. An SEC investigation into a Pimco ETF may have been the last straw. Comments by Pimco CEO Douglas Hodge over the weekend sounded like “don’t let the door hit you on the way out .”

So now investors have a big choice. Should you stay with Pimco Total Return or should you follow Bill Gross to Janus? The answer to both questions is no. Pimco Total Return is an unwieldy mess, and Gross simply isn’t the investor he once was. But investing in an unconstrained bond fund is a good idea, at least with a part of your money. I’ll give you four better alternatives later.

But first, why should you leave Total Return? Because with assets of $222 billion, it has been trailing the market for so long that recapturing its former glory will be like righting a supertanker. Pimco’s new group chief investment officer, Dan Ivascyn, is a terrific money manager, but a team will be running Total Return, not him. And Pimco Total Return simply hasn’t earned investors’ patience.

As for Gross, he’s 70 years old and in great physical shape, but he no longer has an uncanny sense of where the market is going, as he did in his prime. His many bad market calls (like this and this ) and erratic veering between selling and buying Treasuries have been embarrassing. Investing with Gross now is wagering he will become the Bond King again. I wouldn’t bet on that.

But there are several good choices among so-called “unconstrained” bond funds, one of the hottest categories in the mutual fund industry. (Assets grew by $40 billion in the year ended Aug. 31, according to Morningstar.) Those funds aren’t tied to a specific sector, like, say, municipal or high-yield bonds. Rather, they let their managers go anywhere they can find yield or opportunities — with some constraints, of course.