Last Friday Bill Gross, one of the bond market's most renowned investors, quit Pimco for distant rival Janus Capital Group Inc (>> Janus Capital Group Inc) last Friday. He was expected to be fired the next day from the firm he helped found more than 40 years ago, a source said.

TCW, which is overseen by Tad Rivelle, chief investment officer of fixed-income, ranks in the top 25 fund families and has attracted the strongest net inflows so far this year, with Vanguard at No. 1 with net inflows of $86.5 billion, according to Morningstar data. Riville had worked for Gross at Pimco.

Eric Jacobson, senior analyst at Morningstar, said the huge inflows since Friday "makes me wonder if it was a few big accounts or maybe some allocators who have been thinking about jumping and just decided when Bill bailed."

Long-time rivals including Los Angeles-based TCW and Jeffrey Gundlach's DoubleLine are among the biggest beneficiaries of client money fleeing the Newport Beach, California-based Pimco.

DoubleLine, also based in Los Angeles, said on Wednesday its flagship DoubleLine Total Return Bond Fund ended September with net inflows of $1.32 billion, compared with $562 million in August. That brought the fund's net inflow to $3.79 billion so far this year.

(Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Jeffrey Benkoe)

By Jennifer Ablan

Stocks treated in this article : Janus Capital Group Inc, Allianz SE