Any new beginning is uncertain, and this held true for markets in the first month of 2017. The new president’s promises of tax cuts and infrastructure spending appeared to spur newfound confidence in U.S. equities late last year, driving flows into U.S.-equity funds in November and December. January, however, saw a much smaller amount stream into U.S.-equity funds, and the majority of the flows redirected to fixed-income and international-equity funds.
If you help your clients raise financially fit kids, everyone wins: Your clients get peace of mind that their children will be better equipped for life on their own, the children get a financial head start to prepare them for financial independence, and your practice benefits from stronger client relationships and, potentially, a new generation of clients. Our new paper examines: Why learning by example isn’t enough to prepare kids for financial independence. Simple rules of thumb that advisors can encourage their clients to use when teaching their children about money and why parents should be more transparent with their children about their money situation.
Helping your clients navigate personal relationships might not be your favorite talking point, but your willingness to tackle the issue head-on could be key for your business.
Our paper, Financial Turning Points: Relationships, Marriage, and Divorce, examines: How prenuptial agreements and “freedom funds” should be seen as romantic, rather than restricting. How advisors can help their clients learn to argue productively—and why they should. Why tracing financial behavior back to underlying needs is important when married clients have different attitudes about money. How advisors can help clients cope with post-divorce financial reality.
This project aims to classify asset types at the detailed level of paper holdings for fixed-income
or debt-oriented schemes, as disclosed by asset-management companies in their holding data for such schemes.
Morningstar's Credit Ratings ("Morningstar") credit rating process builds upon the knowledge of companies, industries, and financial markets that Morningstar has been accumulating for more than a decade. Morningstar’s credit rating methodology is forward-looking and based on fundamental company research including but not limited to our expectations of future cash flows.
This document describes the methodology behind the Morningstar Analyst Rating™ for funds; the summary expression of our forward-looking analysis of a fund. Ratings are assigned globally on a five-tier scale. Our global analyst team has identified five key areas that we believe are crucial to predicting the future success of funds: People, Parent, Process, Performance, and Price.
To help investors understand the different levels of risk of investing in the various categories of funds, Morningstar will calculate a risk level for each of its fund peer group.
Each security in a fund portfolio is assigned a detailed asset classification, known as the Detail Type Id. In September 2011 Morningstar updated the list of Detail Type codes.
Performance attribution analysis consists of comparing a portfolio's performance with that of a benchmark and decomposing the excess return into pieces to explain the impact of various portfolio management decisions.
This methodology paper is designed by Morningstar Europe to provide technical guidance and govern all requests by fund providers wishing to append track records of one collective investment scheme to that of another.
Morningstar places fixed income funds in one of the nine squares of the Morningstar Style Box based on each fund’s duration and average credit quality.
In Canada, Fixed Income funds that are displayed on Morningstar tools may be subject to two different methodologies depending on which tool they appear on.
The Morningstar Style Box provides an intuitive visual representation of style that helps investors build better portfolios and monitor them more accurately
The updated Morningstar Style Box provides an intuitive visual representation of style that helps investors build better portfolios and monitor them more accurately. This methodology document addresses the Morningstar Fixed-Income Style Box™. The Morningstar Style Box helps investors and advisors determine the investment style of a fund.
The data that drive the fixed income style box is surveyed from fund companies. Morningstar asks fund companies to send the following information on a monthly or quarterly basis for each of their fixed-income and allocation funds.
Sector groups and sectors can be defined by the parameters detailed in the methodology and based on the portfolio statistics of the most recent portfolio holdings data
Portfolio diversification is generally thought of in terms of market capitalization and investment style, yet sector diversification is equally important.
The Morningstar Manager Benchmarks offer a distinct view into a full range of managed investments for incisive performance, portfolio, and operations data analysis that better captures how money mangers and consultants view the manager and investment universes.
Investors often evaluate how reasonable a stock’s price is by looking at a price ratio, such as price-to-earnings (P/E), price-to-book (P/B), price-to-cash flow (P/C), or price-to-sales (P/S).
All managed products are subject to the risk that they may lose value because of the strategies they pursue, the types of securities they invest in, and the uncertainties of investing in general.
The Federal Reserve Board publishes a group of Treasury bond interest rates of various maturities. These are named Treasury Constant Maturities, the best known being the Ten-Year Treasury Constant Maturity.
Morningstar Indexes were created to provide investors with accurate benchmarks for performance measurement, as well as offering discrete building blocks for portfolio construction.
Morningstar’s aim is to help investors determine a Listed Investment Companies (LICs) overall investment merit to help them construct diversified portfolios and achieve their goals.
This document supplements the methodology document for the Morningstar Style BoxTM. This provides additional information about how to rescale the size score for a fund
Morningstar has a rich tradition of holdings-based analysis of mutual funds and other investment portfolios. The portfolio holdings provide insight into the manager’s strategy and help investors determine if an investment might be appropriate for them.
The Similar Funds tool will generate a list of investments that are similar to a user-specified offering. This methodology is based upon several factors including the category, special criteria, portfolio allocation, and performance of the fund provided.
An essential complement to our database of investment information and our suite of quantitative research tools, Morningstar's target-date series analysis focuses on helping fiduciaries make better investment decisions with plan participants' retirement funds
In its annual Target-Date Industry Survey, Morningstar shines a sweeping light across target-date funds, which have become a primary tool for Americans’ retirement savings.
A commonly used measure of return volatility is the standard deviation of monthly returns multiplied by to express it in the same unit as annual return
Morningstar’s UIT composite return combines the returns of each series within a strategy to measure how the strategy has performed over different time periods
