AWS Support Resources

We’re pleased to announce Morningstar has been nominated for the 2012 Aberdeen Platform Awards as the leading independent planning tool provider.

If you’re happy with the service Morningstar provides, please vote for us: The Aberdeen Platform Awards

Morningstar was nominated in the category of Leading Independent Tool Provider, which is for the independent toolset available to advisers that they most value to support their proposition. It may be an end-to-end solution or a tool for one or more link in with the advice chain.

Posted in: Events, IFA News and Commentary, Morningstar, Research,

On Wednesday 13 June it’s the next in our series of webinars from the Best Advice: Closed-end Fund Forum group.  This month our topic is centred around some of the quirks of investment trusts and how to manage these.  Advisers have traditionally been put off investment trusts by their perceived complexity. In reality, closed-ended funds are no more complex than open-ended, but it is worth examining the ‘tricks of the trade’ and how expert investors in investment trusts manage the quirks of investment trusts, notably discounts, liquidity and governance.

We will also be talking through how some of our panel members use investment trusts and where open-ended funds might be more appropriate.

I’m delighted to be joined on the panel by Julian Cane, manager of F&C Capital & Income (FCI) and Peter Walls, of small-cap specialists Unicorn, who are representing the investing side; James Moseley, head of sales at Winterfloods and representing the broker’s perspective; and William Hemmings, Aberdeen’s Head of Closed-end Funds. One of William’s responsibilities is liaison with the boards of Aberdeen’s funds so he brings yet another perspective to the table.

We’d love to hear the questions you want answered. You can submit questions in advance through the ‘feedback’ form at the bottom of this page or by emailing me directly.

Please join us in our discussion by attending here: http://www.brighttalk.com/r/dQB

If you are unable to join the live webinar, you can watch again on demand afterwards. During the live event you will be able to submit questions to the panel and take part in audience votes.

Posted in: Events, IFA News and Commentary, Morningstar, Research,

This BrighTalk Webinar will examine the ‘tricks of the trade’ and how expert investors in investment trusts manage the quirks of investment trusts, notably discounts, liquiditiy and governance. Investors will also talk through where they use investment trusts and where open-ended funds might be more appropriate

Investment Trust Quirks… And How to Manage Them
Live at: June 13,  2012 1:00 pm

To join the webinar, click here

Posted in: Events, IFA News and Commentary, Research,

We’re looking forward to seeing you at the Morningstar Investment Conference on May 15^th and 16^th.  The Adviser Workstation team will be available throughout the two days to answer questions and show you product features. In addition, we’ll have some small group trainings open to Morningstar UK Advisers:

Tuesday, May 15^th

8:25-8:55              Adviser Workstation Training over Breakfast

11:00-12:00         Drop-in Training

12:30-13:00         Training Over Lunch

• For those of you who don’t want training but would like to join other AWS advisers for lunch, please let us know so we can make arrangements

16:00-17:00         Drop-in Training

Wednesday, May 16^th

9:00 – 10:00        Importing Training Session – We’ll help you setup importing from your platform(s), including:

• Seamless Importing from Fidelity and Transact
• Transactional Portfolio Importing

11:00-12:00         Drop-in Training

13:30-14:30         Lunchtime Training Session: Alerts, Research, Automated Client Reporting

• For those of you who don’t want training but would like to join other AWS advisers for lunch, please let us know so we can make arrangements

16:00-17:00         Drop-in Training

Click here to register for the sessions above

Click here for the full Morningstar Investment Conference agenda

Posted in: Events, Morningstar,

With less than a year to go until the implementation of the Retail Distribution Review (RDR), the Association of Investment Companies (AIC) has announced a series of free educational seminars on investment companies across the UK, targeted at financial advisers.

Beginning in London on June 14^th, the AIC will visit ten other regions of the country during 2012. These seminars are aimed at helping advisers understand more about investment companies and as well as representatives from the AIC, they will feature presentations from some of the industry’s top analysts, managers and commentators. At the first event external speakers include: Simon Elliott, Head of Research, Winterflood Investment Trusts and Caroline Gutman from Morningstar.

The agenda for the seminars will include: how to research investment companies – ten key issues to consider, an analyst/manager’s overview of the investment company sector and current opportunities, a platform update and a Q&A panel. All sessions will run from 9.30am until 12.30pm on a Thursday or Friday and CPD points will be available from the CII, CISI and IFP. There is no charge for these events but places are limited and will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.

AIC Adviser Seminars

Jacqueline Lockie, Training Manager, AIC said: “Following on from our series of online training sessions, which were very well received, these seminars are an opportunity for advisers to find out how investment companies might help them to meet their clients’ needs. With strong long-term performance and unrivalled income records, investment companies have many benefits which may have previously been overlooked. Throughout the seminars we will be endeavouring to answer advisers’ questions to ensure that they understand the features and characteristics of investment companies and explore any concerns they might have. We hope to meet as many of you as possible out on the road!”

To register for the AIC adviser seminars please phone Debbie Gibbons at the AIC at 020 7282 5555 or email eventsteam@theaic.co.uk . Please include your name, company, phone number, email and the event location.

Posted in: Events, Morningstar,

Click here for the full agenda, or visit our website to register and for more information. Any questions, please contact Natalie Shattock at investmentconference@morningstar.com.

Posted in: Events, Morningstar,

Dr. Paul Kaplan, Morningstar’s European Quantitave Research Director, will be presenting  Asset Allocation in the 21st Century at our Belfast User Forum, April 19th @ the Fitzwilliam Hotel. Click here to see the schedule and click here to register.

In the meantime, here are some post-Financial Crisis myths debunked by Dr. Kaplan:

1. The global financial crisis was a black swan
This is perhaps the biggest myth about the crisis. By definition, a black swan is an unprecedented major catastrophic event. However, there were many previous such crises whose long history motivated the late Hyman Minsky—writing in the mid 1980s—to formulate his “market instability” hypothesis to explain past crises and predict this one. Indeed, UK investors need only to recall the early 1970s to remember a time of even worse markets when equity investors lost 74% over a two-and-a-half-year period and took over nine years to recover.

2. Diversification did not work during the crash
This myth is due to an exclusive focus on equities. While it’s true that equities lost value worldwide during the crash, the same is simply not true across the asset classes. In fact, during the crash, investors fled to safety and in so doing drove up the price of high quality sovereign bonds (especially US Treasuries) causing asset class diversification to work when it was needed most. So while US stocks lost 47% of their value for the year 2008, a portfolio of 50% US stocks, 40% bonds, and 10% cash would have lost a mere 16% of its value.

3. Modern portfolio theory is dead
The essence of Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) is that investors should hold diversified portfolios such that reward cannot be increased without an increase in risk and visa versa. The limitations of MPT—as first formulated by Harry Markowitz in 1952— lay not in its principles but in the maths that he used. The maths simply could not handle the sort of extreme events that occurred during the crisis. Now, in confusing the maths with the principles, some have declared MPT dead. Nothing could be further from the truth. Now in 2012, we have powerful enough mathematics and computers to apply the principles of MPT in light of the types of extreme outcomes that markets produce from time-to-time with the advantage of far more robust models.

4. Asset allocation should be used to balance the sources of risk
Noting that portfolios created according to the principles of MPT lead to portfolios in which equity exposure is the primary source of risk, some asset managers are today switching to a “risk parity” approach to asset allocation. In this approach, an asset mix is chosen to achieve a portfolio where all asset classes contribute equally to the overall risk; this, they point out, is not the same thing as allocating the portfolio equally among the asset classes. Since this leads to a low risk/low return portfolio, the entire portfolio is then highly levered to goose up the expected return. (Why anyone thinks this is a good idea in a post-crash world is beyond me.) What the risk parity approach is missing is the fact that the sources of risk are also the sources of return. Since equities remain the main source of long-term growth, it follows that equities should be the main source of risk!

5. Fundamentally weighted indexes are better than market-cap weighted indexes
Since equities are the main source of growth for long-term investors, it is no surprise that someone will claim to have found a better way to invest in them. One such claim is that if we weigh stocks by “fundamentals” such as earnings, dividends, revenues, etc, rather than by market capitalisation, we can create better index funds. However, it turns out that this approach is nothing more than placing a value tilt on a portfolio. Since value titled portfolios over the long run tend to outperform the market, so do these fundamentally weighted index funds. The downside is that these products also do poorly when value investing in general does poorly.

This Morningstar article first appeared in City AM.

Posted in: Events, Morningstar, Research,

Nominees for Morningstar European Fund Manager of the Year Awards 2012 have been announced, and Adviser Workstation can give you a closer look at the managers, their funds and our Morningstar Analyst Ratings.

The Morningstar European Fund Manager of the Year Awards draw from the expertise of Morningstar’s European fund analyst team and recognise a select number of fund managers in Europe who have demonstrated excellence in the past year and in their stewardship of fund shareholder capital over the long term. The awards are presented in two distinct categories: Fund Manager of the Year: European Equity and Fund Manager of the Year: Global Equity.

The nominees for the Morningstar European Fund Manager of the Year Awards 2012 are:

European Equity:
Fabio Di Giansante, Pioneer Funds Euroland Equity
Charles Montanaro, Montanaro European Smaller Companies
Laurent Dobler and Arnaud Cosserat, Renaissance Europe

Global Equity:
J. Kristoffer, C. Stensrud, Knut Harald Nilsson, Cathrine Gether, and Ross Porter, SKAGEN Kon-Tiki
Andrew Headley and Charles Richardson, Veritas Global Equity Income and Veritas Global Focus
Rajiv Jain, Vontobel Global Value Equity and Vontobel Emerging Markets Equity

Nominations for the awards are made by Morningstar’s European fund research team of 30 analysts located in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, The Netherlands, Finland, and Norway. To qualify for a nomination, at least one fund under a fund manager’s leadership must have a qualitative fund rating assigned from Morningstar.

To find the funds in Adviser Workstation, run a search in the Open-End funds universe by going to New>Search>Open-End Fund.

In the first row under Field Name, scroll to find Manager Name, then type in the name and click GO. Once you’ve found the manager, click OK to add the name to the search.

You can add multiple managers at once by using ‘OR’ in each row of the search.

Quick Tip: When typing the name in the Manager Name box, select ‘Contains’ instead of ‘Begins With’ to search first names and surnames.

Visit the post on Analyst ratings to see read more about the managers.

Posted in: Events, Morningstar, Press Releases, Quick Tips, Research,

We’d love to know your thoughts on financial advisers’ websites, whether it be your own site or those of your peers. Please take a few minutes to complete our quick survey and help us track trends and attitudes towards financial adviser websites. We’ll be presenting our findings at the Adviser Forums next month. As a thank you for your time you will be entered into a prize draw to receive one of two £100 Amazon gift vouchers.

On completing the survey, your details will be placed into the Morningstar ‘hat’ and the lucky winners will be chosen at random. Winners will be chosen from all submissions received by March 12, 2012 and announced on March 20, 2012.

Thank you for your time and good luck!

This survey is no longer active.

Posted in: Events, Morningstar,

Live Wednesday, February 22, 1pm – 2pm or afterwards on demand

In the current economic climate of low interest rates and low or even negative returns, income funds are fast becoming the must-haves. In this free online webinar, a panel of global equity experts will be talking about where they’re seeing compelling opportunities for growing income; why it is that their investment trusts have been able to deliver steady, predictable income growth for their shareholders; and why global income isn’t just a passing phase.

Attend here: http://www.brighttalk.com/r/TkD

This session will be moderated by Jackie Beard, Director Closed-end Fund Research, Morningstar who will be leading the discussion alongside:

• Bruce Stout, Senior Investment Manager, Aberdeen Asset Management
• Peter Hewitt, Director, Global Equities at F&C Asset Management, F&C Investments
• James de Sausmarez, Director and Head of Investment Trusts, Henderson
• John Baker, Joint Fund Manager of J.P. Morgan Income and Capital Trust, J.P. Morgan Income and Growth Trust and J.P. Morgan Elect Managed Income

If you are unable to join any the live event, you can watch on demand immediately afterwards. During the live event you will be able to submit questions to the panel and take part in audience votes.

Posted in: Events, IFA News and Commentary, Morningstar, Research,