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Methodology Documents

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Methodology Documents

Morningstar’s Strategy Series database identifies and links together investments across a shared management team and shared investment approach (that is, strategy) that are offered as a spectrum of solutions for investors.
Methodology Documents

Morningstar Category classifications sorts portfolios into peer groups based on their holdings. The categories help investors identify the top performing funds, assess potential risk, and build well-diversified portfolios. Here is how those categories are decided upon and funds assigned to them.
Methodology Documents

Morningstar Category classifications sorts portfolios into peer groups based on their holdings. The categories help investors identify the top performing funds, assess potential risk, and build well-diversified portfolios. Here is how those categories are decided upon and funds assigned to them.
Methodology Documents

The Morningstar Categories for funds in the Europe/Asia/Africa universe were first established in the early years of the UCITS (Undertaking for Collective Investment in Transferable Securities) Directive to help investors make meaningful comparisons between Investment funds.
Methodology Documents

Morningstar has conducted research on active and passive investment strategies and their associated vehicles since 1986.
Methodology Documents

Morningstar has conducted qualitative, analyst-driven research on 529 plans since 2004. Since July 2012, we have expressed this research through the Morningstar Medalist Rating for 529 College-Savings Plans. An essential complement to our database of investment information and our suite of quantitative research tools, Morningstar's 529 plan analysis has always focused on helping individuals who are saving for education expenses make better investment decisions.
Methodology Documents

The Morningstar Portfolio Risk Score assesses risk and diversification to help investors, financial professionals, and those who oversee large groups of financial professionals to assess whether the riskiness of the portfolio matches the risk profile of an investor.
Methodology Documents

Morningstar identifies a Primary Share in Market for open-end funds and exchange-traded funds. This is a proprietary data point and the primary share class is identified by the application of a set of hierarchal criteria.
Methodology Documents

Morningstar provides data on individual securities registered in dozens of countries, but researchers evaluating those investments often have a need to study groups of investments as they're branded in a local market.
Methodology Documents

The Financial Conduct Authority, or FCA, introduced an environmental, social, and governance-related disclosure regime in 2024: the Sustainability Disclosure Requirements that will affect both asset managers and distributors.
Methodology Documents

Morningstar’s estimated cash flows dataset for mutual funds represents a detailed analysis designed to assess the capital contributions and withdrawals made by fund investors while accounting for the reinvestment of distributions.
Methodology Documents

The Morningstar Style Box helps investors determine the investment style of a fund. Different investment styles have different levels of risk that lead to differences in returns. The Morningstar Style Box provides an intuitive and visual representation of style that helps investors build better portfolios and monitor them more precisely.
Methodology Documents

Augmenting investment research with natural language processing.
Methodology Documents

Manager tenure is the length of time that an investment manager or team of managers has been leading an investment fund.
Methodology Documents

The Morningstar Risk Models are a suite of multifactor risk models that help investors identify and evaluate the risk of their portfolios using holdings-based analysis.
Methodology Documents

The Insiders dataset is a compilation of the insider dealings information for companies in the US and UK markets.
Methodology Documents

Morningstar Sustainalytics’ Portfolio Low Carbon Transition Metrics enable investors to understand the degree to which the greenhouse gas emissions—attributable to a portfolio—differ from its fair-share GHG emissions budget.
Methodology Documents

Morningstar calculates and produces comparative analytics to aid product users and investors in vehicle-, strategy-, and firm-level analysis. Morningstar's derived data points are meant to illuminate the connections within, as well as the breadth of, the market as a whole.
Methodology Documents

The Morningstar Risk Decomposition tool achieves this by breaking down a portfolio's risk into individual factors and holdings. This capability allows users to analyze the origins of both total and active risk within each portfolio.
Methodology Documents

The Canadian Investment Funds Standards Committee was formed in January 1998 by Canada’s major mutual fund database and research firms to standardize the classifications of Canada-domiciled retail mutual funds. In 2020, CIFSC began work on a framework to identify Canadian investment funds that sufficiently practice responsible investing. The framework was finalized in 2022.
Methodology Documents

This guide covers several statistics that are derived from rates of return. They include what are commonly referred to as modern portfolio theory statistics as well as several others. They provide information about individual funds and are also used to compare against other funds, usually within fund categories.
Methodology Documents

Commodity Focus Group and Commodity Focus provide an attribute schema for commodities-focused ETF strategies that is granular enough to capture the diversity of the commodities landscape.
Methodology Documents

The EU taxonomy is a classification system of environmentally sustainable activities that require large EU corporations to disclose information that indicates how aligned the company's revenue, operating expenditure, and capital expenditure are to the EU goal of being net zero by 2050.
Methodology Documents

As a comparative measure of the cost of implementing each portfolio, Morningstar calculates the Prospective Acquired Fund Expense for vehicles within the U.S. and U.K. markets.
Methodology Documents

Hedge funds have proliferated and become an accepted allocation within institutional investor portfolios, but there is not a generally accepted definition of what constitutes a hedge fund.
Methodology Documents

Closed-end funds can borrow money to help finance the acquisition of their investment portfolio with the hope of enhancing shareholder returns. It gives the fund managers freedom to take advantage of a long-term view, or to quickly act upon a favorable situation with a particular stock without having to sell existing investments to raise the necessary cash.
Methodology Documents

Strategy data, coupled with Morningstar's investment-level and rich portfolio holdings data, informs a comprehensive analytical view of where a strategy fits within investor portfolios and the global marketplace.