Selin Doğan's Fixed Income Edge: How Marmara Portföy Built Turkey's Best Bond Desk Outside the Banks

The licensing process for a new Turkish asset management company takes, on a good day, approximately twelve months. It took Selin Dogan eighteen. Not because of any regulatory problem with her application (her SPK file was, by the Capital Markets Board's own standards, comprehensive) but because the Board requested two rounds of supplementary documentation on the firm's risk management procedures, each round requiring fresh legal opinions, certified translations, and a waiting period that the SPK's official processing guidelines suggest should take weeks and in practice takes rather longer. The extended timeline, however, appears to have had an unintended benefit: by the time Marmara launched, the firm had eighteen months of credit analysis work already completed, a head start that would prove material to its early track record.

Dogan, 41 at the time of Marmara's seventh anniversary, is the founder and chief investment officer of Marmara Portföy Yönetimi A.Ş., which she established in early 2014 and launched commercially in mid-2015 after the licensing delay. According to LinkedIn and Deutsche Bank alumni records, she spent nine years at Deutsche Bank's Istanbul office, working on the credit analysis desk covering Turkish and regional emerging market issuers before moving to the European high-yield team in Frankfurt for three years. She returned to Istanbul in 2013 and founded Marmara the following year. The timing was deliberate: Turkey's corporate bond market was at an inflection point. The banking sector had spent two decades dominating fixed income distribution and analysis, and the market was beginning to develop in ways that a bank-affiliated structure could not fully serve. The thesis behind Marmara was that an independent firm could build something in that gap.

The Gap in the Market

To understand what Marmara Portföy has built, it helps to understand what Turkey's corporate bond market looked like when Doğan entered it. In 2015, domestic Turkish corporate bond issuance was dominated by financial sector issuers (banks and leasing companies) with limited non-financial corporate participation. The investor base was narrow, dominated by the same bank treasury desks that were often related parties to the issuers. Buy-side credit analysis, meaning the systematic, independent evaluation of corporate creditworthiness through primary research (reading loan covenants, modelling cash flows, conducting management interviews, assessing sector dynamics), was essentially absent from the independent asset management sector. Banks did credit analysis, but they did it to serve their lending decisions, not their fund clients.

The thesis behind Marmara was that as the corporate bond market developed (more non-financial issuers, more sukuk issuance, more international investors looking for yield in Turkish credit), the demand for genuinely independent credit analysis would create an opening for a boutique willing to do the work that bank-affiliated managers could not credibly do because of the conflicts embedded in their ownership structure. A bank-owned asset manager evaluating the credit quality of a corporate issuer that also has a lending relationship with the parent bank faces pressures that an independent manager does not. The issue is not one of individual dishonesty but of structural incentives: the ownership structure creates conflicts that a fund investor should understand. An independent manager like Marmara, which owns nothing but its funds, does not face those same pressures.

The Track Record

Marmara Portföy manages two main funds, both listed on TEFAS. The Marmara Kurumsal Tahvil Fonu, launched in August 2015, invests in domestic Turkish corporate bonds, primarily non-financial issuers. The Marmara Kira Sertifikası Fonu, launched in March 2018, invests in sukuk, the Islamic fixed income instruments that have grown significantly as a share of Turkish capital markets issuance over the past decade, driven by both regulatory encouragement and genuine demand from domestic investors who prefer Shariah-compliant instruments.

The corporate bond fund's performance history is the foundation of Marmara's reputation. Since inception through September 2022, the fund has generated an average excess return of approximately 180 basis points annually over the Takasbank BIST-KYD corporate bond benchmark, with positive excess returns in six of the seven full calendar years in the record. The one negative year, 2018, reflected a broader emerging market credit selloff rather than any issuer-specific credit event in the portfolio. Doğan was not exposed to any of the high-profile Turkish corporate defaults of 2018-2020 that caught some competing funds.

The sukuk fund has a shorter history but a stronger relative track record: since launch, it has outperformed the Takasbank BIST-KYD sukuk benchmark by an average of 220 basis points annually through September 2022. The sukuk market is smaller and less liquid than the conventional bond market, which creates more pronounced mispricings and more opportunity for an analyst who has done proprietary credit work. The sukuk market in Turkey is underresearched even by the standards of the broader corporate bond market; most participants are driven by the Shariah compliance screen rather than by independent credit analysis, which creates an opportunity for a manager that applies both filters simultaneously.

Combined AUM across both funds stood at approximately 1.2 billion TL as of mid-2022 TEFAS data. For context, this is a relatively modest figure compared to the bank-affiliated fund managers that dominate the Turkish asset management industry by AUM, but it is substantial for an independent boutique with a seven-year track record in a specialised mandate.

Where It Gets Complicated

Marmara Portföy's fixed income business is, by the standards of Turkey's independent fund sector, genuinely impressive. The criticism worth making is not about the investment process; it is about three commercial and structural decisions that create real risks for the firm and for the investors in its funds.

The first is client concentration. Based on TEFAS flow data and fund factsheet disclosures, approximately 65% of Marmara's total AUM appears to be sourced from a small number of institutional investors, likely a private pension fund and a corporate treasury function. This is common in the early years of a boutique but is a structural fragility at the seven-year mark. If either client were to redeem (for reasons entirely unrelated to Marmara's performance, such as an internal allocation review or a change in their own circumstances) the firm would face a serious question about its viability at current operating costs. The retail flows through TEFAS are growing but slowly. Diversifying the client base remains the area where Marmara has not matched the quality of its investment work.

The second is the equity venture. In early 2021, Marmara launched a third fund, the Marmara Hisse Senedi Fonu, managed by a former senior fixed income analyst who transitioned to equities. The fund launched with 60 million TL in initial subscriptions, largely from existing clients presumably persuaded by the fixed income track record that the firm could transfer the same analytical rigour to equity selection. It has not worked. TEFAS data shows the fund underperformed the BIST100 total return index by approximately 14% in its first full calendar year. As of September 2022, AUM has declined to 45 million TL and performance has not recovered materially. The episode illustrates two common misjudgements in boutique expansion: first, the assumption that fixed income discipline transfers directly to equity culture; it does not, as the time horizons, information environment, and required temperament are fundamentally different; second, promoting an analyst into a portfolio management role without adequate transitional support. The fund remains open, and SPK filings suggest the firm is seeking external equity expertise rather than relying on internal redeployment. Whether that process produces a credible result remains to be seen.

The third shortcoming is the management fee on the sukuk fund. At 2.1% annually, it sits at the upper end of comparable sukuk funds available through TEFAS, some of which are offered by larger, bank-affiliated managers at fees of 1.4-1.6%. The implicit justification for the premium is performance: the fund has consistently outperformed the lower-fee alternatives on a net basis. That justification holds while the performance edge persists. It is worth investors monitoring whether the fee premium remains defensible as the fund's AUM grows and the market opportunity potentially narrows.

What Marmara Portföy Represents

Seven years into building an independent fixed income boutique in a market where the distribution infrastructure, the institutional relationships, and the analytical tradition all sit inside banks, Selin Dogan has done something real. The credit analysis process is genuine, documented, and evidenced in a portfolio that has avoided the major credit events of the past decade while generating consistent excess returns. The institutional recognition appears to be growing: public records and industry sources suggest the firm has begun receiving international institutional interest, a validation milestone even if it does not translate into near-term commercial flows.

The equity misstep is a real setback. The institutional concentration is a real risk. These should be weighed alongside the fixed income track record by any investor evaluating the firm. But they do not diminish what Marmara Portföy has built in its core business: a research-driven, conflict-free fixed income capability that fills a gap that the Turkish market needs filled. Whether the firm can resolve its commercial and structural vulnerabilities while maintaining the investment quality that created its reputation is the open question going into the next phase of its development.