Having been in the industry for more than 40 years, Dan Fuss has been on of the greats of the bond fund world for decades and topping out his category on both a 5- and 10-year basis. Though Loomis Sayles Bond (LSBRX) hasn’t made an appearance in the Rukeyser 100 since September 2008, a year when Fuss’s penchant for corporate bonds pushed the fund to a 22 percent loss during the credit crisis, it has generated solid long-term returns. And those long-term results and the experience driving them are just what investors should be looking to.

If you owned shares of Loomis Sayles Bond in 2008, you probably don’t give a fig about the fact that the strategy Dan Fuss uses in his bond selection has never changed.

Fuss favors bonds that the rest of the market hates. But he also purchases beaten down issues and waits for them to rebound; a strategy that cost him big when he didn’t lose confidence in corporate bonds in 2008.

A multisector bond fund that dips into all corners of the bond market looking for undervalued issues, he insisted that the sell-off in corporate bonds was completely out of proportion to their true value.

Only buying bonds that offer above average yields relative to their peers and if the issuer has the creditworthiness and cash flows to back up its debt, 2008 appeared to be a bonanza for Fuss.

In the wake of the crushing 22.1 percent loss the fund suffered that year, pushing it into the bottom 85 percent of its category, that would seem to be an error in judgment. But that determination paid off big when the fund returned almost 40 percent the following year and has been running strong ever since.

But now that corporate bonds are beginning to get overvalued, Fuss and his team are stepping back from that market in favor of asset-backed bonds and issues by foreign governments.

The fund has the leeway to invest as much as 20 percent of assets in securities issued outside of North America, something Fuss is taking full advantage of as global debt concerns have created opportunities in sovereign debt.

As concerns have been mounting over the direction of the dollar, Fuss has been upping his stakes in debt denominated in Canadian and New Zealand dollars, as well as the Indonesian rupiah and Norwegian krone. The fund’s position in high yield issues, a sector which historically performs well when the Fed is tightening, as also risen to a quarter of assets — a shift from the focus on investment grade credits which Fuss was picking up on the cheap early last year.

Loomis Sayles Bond’s cash position is also on the uptick having reached almost 5 percent of assets. The management team believes rising interest rates will inevitably create dislocations in the market as volatility ticks up and they want a store of dry powder to take advantage of those opportunities.

They’re particularly interested in Treasury bonds, though when the time to make those purchases is extremely uncertain. Fuss thinks that Treasuries could be facing an oversupply in the coming years as the government runs a large and growing federal deficit. The government will likely have to take steps to address those concerns sooner rather than later though, and when that happens opportunities will abound.

Fuss is one of a handful of bond fund managers with enough experience in the markets–and a proven track record of navigating tough waters–to be trusted to shepherd investors through shifting interest rate cycles. Having survived the stagflation of the 1970s, the recession of the 1980s and our most recent woes, there really isn’t a type of credit cycle he hasn’t seen.

That’s not to say that there won’t be some increased volatility in Loomis Sayles Bond, though. Fuss takes full advantage of its go-almost-anywhere mandate and that can lead to more short-term swings than you would see in his more conservatively managed Managers Bond cousin which I discussed in this month’s feature article.

Taking a fairly deep-value approach to bond selection, Fuss moves into battered areas of the bond market before the beating has actually ended, relying on his experience to guide the way.

He has taken steps to limit that volatility in the short term, stepping the fund’s average duration back to 6.3 years from the 10 years-plus duration he had been running. I expect that duration to continue to decline over the coming months as current holdings are sold and invested in shorter dated issues.

That approach has generated an 8.6 percent gain for the fund since its inception, ranking it in the top 10 percent of its category for the past 15 year period. While that might lead you to believe that there may be better options out there, none of those better performing funds have similarly long tenured managers. And now is the time to look for experience over youth in a bond fund manager.