BARINGS LLC

Barings LLC entered 2026 with $6.19B in assets, roughly $760M more than it managed at year-end, and deployed a significant portion of that new capital into two corporate-bond ETFs — LQD and JAAA — in a move that now frames more than a quarter of the entire portfolio. The $938.7M LQD position nearly tripled in share terms (from 2.77M to 8.61M shares) and grew by $633M in market value to become the second-largest holding after IVV. JAAA, the Janus Henderson AAA CLO ETF, rose $347M to $650M — the second-largest single-quarter increase in the filing. Together those two credit-focused positions now represent over 25% of Barings' equity-book, concentrated in investment-grade corporate credit and AAA-rated collateralized loan obligations in a way that reflects a deliberate income-and-duration bet more than a passive allocation. On the equity side, QQQ entered as a new $503M position (Nasdaq-100 via Invesco's product), while the top S&P 500 core, IVV, was pared by $122M despite remaining the largest single holding at $1.06B. The filing also showed nine new names alongside nine sold positions, including rotation within equity sleeves: IW (iShares S&P 500 growth) exited while VTV entered, and within single-stock names AstraZeneca, Suncor, and Caterpillar-energy-adjacent names (EOG, Coterra) appeared while Freeport-McMoRan and Vale left. What is most striking about the portfolio is not that it rotates — active managers rotate — but that the story is almost entirely being told through ETFs: the top seven holdings are all ETFs, collectively accounting for roughly 71% of the book. That structure is coherent for a multi-strategy or fund-of-funds wrapper where ETFs are the primary sleeves, but it means the headline conviction signals are sleeve-rotation signals rather than single-name calls. The $760M AUM inflow alongside the aggressive credit build suggests investors put money to work in Barings specifically for its fixed-income and alternative-credit exposure, and this 13F shows the portfolio structure meeting that demand.