The 5 Most Important Fund Pages in Our Premium Service

Whether you've just joined or have belonged for years, there may be a thing or two you don't know about Morningstar's Premium content. We've got a lot of cool tools and analysis, but today I want to share the five most important pages in the Premium Membership service for mutual fund investors. (We've got tons of other great stuff on stocks, options, and even hedge funds, but I'll leave that for another day.)

If you're not a Premium Member yet, you can still access all of these pages by simply taking a free, 14-day Premium Membership trial.

1.  Analyst Research. This goes right to the heart and soul of our work. This is the page where the analyst breaks down all the key points on a fund. Our analysts visit fund companies, interview managers, and analyze all the relevant data to give you our take on whether a fund is a keeper or a reject. We delve into strategy, manager background, performance, and more to help you understand the fund and make good use of it.

There are two ways to access the analyst research. You can type a fund name or ticker into our quote box in the upper left-hand corner of Morningstar.com. Next, select the analyst research tab in the column on the left-hand side of the page. Alternatively you can start on the list of all the funds we analyze. This is ranked by the date published, but you can also click on a letter near the top to narrow the field down to funds whose names start with the same letter.

2.  Fund Analyst Picks List. The next logical step in our analysis is to highlight the funds that we consider to be best in class. We select about 180 funds out of the more than 6,000 in existence for this list. We consider these funds to have the most attractive risk/reward potential. In short, we look for funds with sustainable competitive advantages--long-term picks meant to help you reach your goals. The picks page is ranked alphabetically so you can easily check out your favorite fund companies. However, if you want to see all of our favorites grouped by category, just click on the  category heading at the top of the page.

The picks list is a great time-saver as it can help you get right to the good stuff and then select from among a handful of the very best. You can find a link in the middle of the home page (under Analyst Research) or on the right side of the funds cover page.

3.  Premium Fund Screener.  The Premium service is all about research, and the Premium Fund Screener is a great engine for that. You can run a screen on scores of data points to narrow the field. Say you want to find a good large-value fund. You could screen for large-value funds with an expense ratio below 1.2%, rated 4 or 5 stars, with a manager tenure greater than five years, excluding institutional funds, and limiting it to distinct portfolios only (this helps to avoid pulling up multiple share classes of the same fund). Voila you're down to  fewer than 30 funds. You can then rank on any data point to narrow the field further. You might want to rank on yield for example. Or say you want to avoid a sector because you own your company's stock and already have plenty of exposure to it. Then you could rank by the weighting in that sector and chose one of the funds that has a low weighting.

You can also use it to combine Premium features such as Analyst Picks or Stewardship Grades along with any other criteria you want. The Premium Fund Screener opens up a wide array of research possibilities; I've just scratched the surface. You can find this under the Tools tab or under the Funds tab on the right side of the page under "Find a Fund."

4.  Stewardship Grades. This a companion piece to the analyst research. You'll find it on Fund Report pages in a tab just below Analyst Research. Here we spell out how well the fund's managers, board of directors, and fund company have served shareholders. We'll tell you how much the managers invest in the funds they run, whether the fund company has been in hot water with regulators, and whether the fund firm thinks first about profits or fundholders. An investment in a mutual fund is a beginning of a long-term relationship based on trust. Therefore, it's important to know if the fund company will stand behind you, because over time it will make key decisions that will have a big impact on the fund's long-term success.

5.  Portfolio X-Ray. This isn't strictly a mutual fund tool, but it's a crucial part of the process. A typical investor might own 10 mutual funds and five stocks, or vice versa. It's not easy to see how all those pieces fit together unless you use X-ray. We look at all your holdings and your weightings, and let you know how things shape up. We're not just looking at the fund's category and assigning a 100% weighting to that spot in the style box. Portfolio X-Ray is actually pulling together the underlying holdings from all of your funds and crunching the numbers on them right alongside your individual stock holdings.

You might well find that you had more money in a sector or asset type than you thought. Or you might be shocked to see you have almost nothing in a sector. In a similar vein, the stock intersection tab could show you that three of your funds owned the same bank stock indicating that you may not be as diversified as you think.

Portfolio X-Ray is a huge help in understanding your overall picture and in selecting new stocks and funds that will complement your existing holdings. You can find it by clicking on the Portfolio tab at the top of any page.

As a Premium Member, you'll undoubtedly navigate to these pages again and again. Better yet, bookmark them today for direct access. And if you haven't tried Premium Membership yet, see for yourself what our research and tools can do by taking a free, 14-day trial membership.