The Morningstar Adviser Team ventured to Wales on June 22nd to present Morningstar’s software and research capabilities to IFAs in the Cardiff area. We have several clients in and around Cardiff so it was nice to see some familiar faces as well as meet others for the first time. The day gave us a great opportunity to discuss some very timely matters facing advisers, most notably looking at the whole market when considering investment products for clients.
Jackie Beard and Tom Treanor, both of the Morningstar investment trust research team, joined us for a discussion which aimed to explain some of the key components of investment trusts and how they can be used in a client portfolio when the full market needs to be considered.
We found the reception from IFAs to be a little guarded – mainly based on past scandals involving investment trust dealing – but we also found our audience could benefit from an independent analysis of these types of investments.
We realise the industry is crying out for better information, better analysis and more insight so we’re very excited to be expanding our qualitative research capabilities to cover investment trusts and ETFs.
If you have a need for this kind of analysis or if you have any feedback for us, please let us know. The slides from the Jackie and Tom’s presentation are available by clicking here.
The Adviser Workstation portion of the day consisted of one-on-one training sessions and an overview of the system’s capabilities with a focus on importing client portfolios and investment planning.
It was great to see some of our oldest clients learning new features of the system and taking useful bits of information back to their offices.
We also saw an increased need for client reporting tools and a process to produce consistent output on a regular basis. I will be focussing on these types of things in future training classes so please feel free to provide any feedback or requests in the comments section below.
Our development team is hard at work this summer preparing for the next software release in early September.
We have some great new features planned that are sure to make your day-to-day operations run even smoother. Stay tuned for more about these additional features.