This year's nominees for fixed income are an unusual group While our past nominees and winners have frequently featured core intermediate-term bond offerings such as Bill Gross' PIMCO Total Return (PTTRX), neither Gross nor many of his direct competitors found 2011's bond markets hospitable.

There were some standouts (in the intermediate-term bond group), such as Jeffrey Gundlach, the manager of DoubleLine Total Return Bond (DBLTX), which smoked its competitors with a 9% gain through Dec. 6. But while that fund and Gundlach clearly deserve an honorable mention, the fund's fat returns were fueled by atypically large stakes in nonagency and exotic mortgage-backed securities. Those allocations gave it a much more aggressive risk profile than that of most rivals and could make the fund perform quite differently than most investors would expect from a more conventional core bond offering.