Eaton Vance Income Opportunities ETF XAGG ETF Analysis

As first noted on Jan. 5, 2026, Morgan Stanley Fixed Income Opportunities was converted to an exchange-traded fund and renamed Eaton Vance Income Opportunities ETF, effective Nov. 10, 2025. This transition follows a May 2025 update to the strategy’s investment process, which removed the requirement to invest at least 40% of assets outside the US and shifted the benchmark from the USD-hedged Bloomberg Global Aggregate Bond Index to the Bloomberg US Aggregate Bond Index. Despite these changes, the fund’s benchmark-agnostic and wide-ranging investment approach remains intact. There have also been notable changes to the portfolio management team. In June 2025, the firm announced that Michael Kushma, chief investment officer of broad markets fixed income, will retire in 2026. Kushma stepped down from the portfolio management team in December 2025. Mike Rosborough, who joined from Alliance Bernstein in March 2025, will assume the role of head of developed-markets macro. Additionally, Brandon Matsui joined the portfolio management team in November 2025. Matsui, who is a named portfolio manager on all Morgan Stanley ETFs, is responsible for maintaining the views of the strategy’s key risk-takers—Kushma, Andrew Szczurowski, Brian Shaw, and Justin Bourgette—while managing ETF flows. Portfolio manager Matsui joined Morgan Stanley in February 2023 after six years at DWS as the head of fixed income for the firm’s systematic investment solutions group, where he was responsible for the day-to-day management of the firm’s Xtrackers suite of fixed-income ETFs. Before that, he spent six years at Charles Schwab, where he comanaged the firm’s fixed-income ETFs. Despite the transition to an ETF structure and changes to the management team, we maintain the strategy’s Average People and Process Pillar ratings, as the continuity among key decision-makers and the preservation of the core investment process remain reassuring.