My name is Kent White. I’m the portfolio manager for Thrivent Income Fund. I’ve been managing the Fund since 2017. I co-manage the Fund with Cortney Swensen, who has also been on the Fund since 2023.

The primary objective of Thrivent Income Fund is a higher level of income, and we seek to do that through investing primarily in investment-grade corporate bonds. A secondary objective is the preservation of capital. How we do that is, generally, in certain environments, we might want to shift into a higher-quality positioning in the Income Fund, whether that’s through higher-quality corporate bonds or asset allocation decisions, like shifting more of our portfolio into U.S. government bonds or other high-quality investments.

We are very cognizant of how we’re positioned versus our peer group, whether we’re long duration or short duration and where we’re positioned on the curve in an environment like this in which we anticipate the Federal Reserve will begin to cut rates. We also manage interest rate risk in the portfolio, and we accomplish that primarily through our Treasury and futures holdings and adjust where we want to be on the curve depending on the interest rate environment that we are foreseeing.

Thrivent Income Fund, Class S, outperformed its benchmark, the Bloomberg Corporate Bond Index, during the second quarter of 2024. We accomplished that primarily through security selection, which is where we really like to see our alpha generation come from. We’ve got a great team of analysts that provide a lot of input into our portfolio process. The primary way that we want to outperform is by good security selection—deciding which companies we want to be invested in.

Thrivent Income Fund, Class S, also has a four-star Overall Morningstar Rating^™ versus its Corporate Bond Fund peer group.