Morningstar Awards for Investing Excellence: Outstanding Allocation Portfolio Manager Nominees

Today, we’re unveiling the nominees for the 2025 Morningstar Awards for Investing Excellence: Outstanding Allocation Portfolio Manager.

• Michael Gates, BlackRock
• David Giroux, T. Rowe Price
• Phil Green, BlackRock

To be eligible for the award, managers needed to earn analyst-assigned Morningstar Medalist Ratings of Gold or Silver on at least one fund share class or investment vehicle, as well as a People Pillar rating of Above Average or High. Long, impressive track records and proven investment skill are also important. Morningstar will announce this year’s winner in early July.

Here is what set this year’s nominees apart.

Michael Gates

Since launching BlackRock’s model portfolio business in 2014, Michael Gates has established an exceptional record of leadership and results. As the US head of the firm’s model portfolio group, Gates consistently pushes to refine and enhance the process his team uses to build portfolios and tactically deviate when there’s opportunity. In total, financial advisors have more than $160 billion in assets following Gates through the myriad models he oversees that include tax-aware portfolios, portfolios that include private markets, and portfolios that feature open architecture underlying strategies. The trust advisors are putting in Gates to deliver for their clients is well-founded.

The team’s flagship Target Allocation ETF model portfolio series spans 11 portfolios, moving from 100% equity to 100% fixed-income portfolios in 10-percentage-point increments. Those portfolios have established a generally strong track record from their September 2014 start through April 2025, typically outperforming their respective Morningstar Category indexes on a total and risk-adjusted return basis. The 60/40 portfolio, for example, has an annualized gain of 7.1% that beat its Morningstar Moderate Target Risk Index category benchmark by almost 1 percentage point, and it did so with about the same level of volatility.

David Giroux

As the winner of multiple Morningstar investment awards and a nominee of even more, portfolio manager David Giroux has readily earned his stellar reputation over his almost two decades managing the T. Rowe Price Capital Appreciation strategies. He initially joined the fund as a comanager in mid-2006 and soon took over as the lead in early 2007. Over his tenure, the mutual fund has grown into a $66.5 billion behemoth, yet Giroux and his crew have continued to keep ahead of peers with a combination of strong stock selection and timely shifts between stocks and bonds.

The fund’s institutional share class’ 9.9% annualized gain from Giroux’s June 2006 start through May 2025 beat all peers in the moderate-allocation category with records that long. Even more impressive, that performance is close to the S&P 500’s 10.6% gain over the same period, but it was achieved with considerably lower volatility: The fund has a standard deviation of 11.3% compared with the index’s 15.4%, making for superior risk-adjusted returns.

Phil Green

Portfolio manager Phil Green and his global tactical allocation team took the firm’s already well-regarded LifePath Index target-date offering and gave it a more active kick, adding tactical asset allocation firepower and making use of a wider toolkit of underlying actively managed strategies. The team has shown a knack for deconstructing complex market dynamics into their constituent parts, testing each premise, and recombining them into novel market signals and economic indicators.

The team’s demonstrated ability to break with conventional wisdom and translate that to consistently additive performance has truly differentiated these target-date strategies. That includes, for example, successfully leaning into US equities in 2023 when conventional wisdom pointed to a probable US recession brought on by the Federal Reserve’s efforts to tamp down on inflation. Then in August 2024, the team opportunistically bought Japanese equities in a period of price-sensitive selling, in time to see those holdings rebound shortly thereafter. Adept moves like these have allowed the institutional share class of the mutual funds in the series to beat their respective target-date category indexes by 65 to more than 150 basis points annually since Green joined the roster in November 2016 through May 2025.