If you have some money saved and you want to get some profitability out of it, surely you are considering changing your condition of saver for that of investor. However, when you decide to invest, you realize that the market offers you a wide range of financial options from which to choose which ones best suit your profile. To help you in this choice, you have some tools that will allow you to better understand all these alternatives. This is the case of Morningstar, a site where you will find information, analysis and monitoring of the different financial products.
What is Morningstar?
Morningstar is a provider of financial product analysis and evaluation, which began its activity in 1984 with the idea of ?? generating tools and products that could help the end investor. And it is that its creator, Joe Mansueto, has always been of the opinion that data and information on investment funds should be public and accessible to all.
And that’s what he did at Morningstar: bringing together, classifying, and organizing information – accessible and understandable – on a single platform on all investment products, so that any user can better manage their investments and achieve their financial goals. And although it began by only analyzing funds, one of its most interesting characteristics is the immense amount of assets that it currently has in its database, more than 500,000, and which can be accessed from its website. All of this has made this site a reference for financial analysis. Morningstar Spain began its operations in 2001 and, from its website, gives access to and information regarding the funds available to private investors in Spain.
What does Morningstar do?
Morningstar offers data and analytical insights on a broad financial offering, including managed investment products, publicly traded companies, private equity markets, and real-time market data. In addition, these product analyzes are done from all points of view, that is, he does not stay with a mere study of the numbers.
In this sense, Morningstar has developed a classification system that evaluates the quality of investment funds – grouping them by categories (to be able to compare) – based on their profitability (in the last three, five, and ten years) and taking into account the commissions of each product (not only those of management and deposit but also those of subscription that influence the final return that you will obtain), as well as the risk of the same (at the same return, a fund that presents fewer risks is preferable, that is, , which registers fewer fluctuations in its returns). In accordance with all this, Morningstar draws up its particular rating, by which it gives a rating of between one and five stars to each product.
Of course, you can find funds that do not have any stars. As indicated by Morningstar, there are situations in which a rating cannot be established, either because the life of the fund is less than three years, there is not enough information for it to be included in one of the categories analyzed by the company, when there are no similar products to establish a classification, or when the fund has undergone major changes in its investment strategy and therefore its historical performance data is not relevant.
How is the rating done?
Morningstar makes it very clear that this is a purely quantitative rating , that is, it is based on past profitability and risk calculations (more specifically, the calculations are made every month and are based on monthly data for the last three years). Therefore, there is no subjective or qualitative factor in the valuation of the fund. In this sense, they also warn that past performance is not a guarantee of future performance (that a fund has had good results in the past does not mean that it will continue to obtain them in the future). However, the Morningstar Rating can serve as a guide when considering an investment.
Regarding the procedure that Morningstar follows to award its stars, you should bear in mind that the company analyzes all funds and scores them taking into account aspects such as profitability or commissions. Once rated all products, Morningstar does a ranking with them according to the final score they have obtained. And once all products are ranked in order from highest to lowest, Morningstar gives them a rating of between one and five stars.
Thus, the 10% of the funds that are in the highest part of the ranking get five stars, regardless of their score (that is, if there are 200 products in the ranking, the first 20 would get the highest score). 22.5% of the products that follow the first would obtain four stars (in the example, it would be the 45 funds that follow the first 20 that have obtained the five stars). The next 35% of products (in our example, the 70 funds that would occupy positions 66 to 135) get three stars, while the next 22.5% get two stars (the next 45 products) and The remaining 10%, one (would be the last 20 funds in the ranking). This makes a fund can see its varied rating despite maintaining investments, costs and even profitability, depending on whether there are funds that have improved or worsened their situation.
How can Morningstar help you?
Remember that Morningstar is a tool that can be very useful for you to find investment funds that are suitable for the investment strategy that you have designed in advance. Morningstar can help you with your search, but it won’t tell you how to invest. However, if you want to structure a diversified portfolio and have a diversification strategy already designed, just go to the advanced fund search tool so that you can find funds in the category that interests you and select the 5 stars of Morningstar rating. . It is a very complete tool that allows you to search and filter almost any parameter that may interest you.
What else does Morningstar offer you?
In addition, to funding industry reports and analysis, Morningstar provides you with a tool to create or track your personal portfolio. In My portfolio you can create your own portfolio and, if you already have it, see at a glance an X-ray of your global position (summary of all the stocks and bonds present in the funds you own), a very complete information on each of the investment funds and tables of all the funds that can be organized by the desired criteria.
Morningstar also has a fund comparer, in which you just have to type the name of the products you want to compare. It also allows you to search for qualitative analysis. Thus, you can search a list of funds for all those that have a Qualitative Rating.
Also, in addition to the well-known Morningstar Rating, the company offers you other innovative and exclusive investment tools:
- Morningstar Style Box – Ranks investment offers by volume and investment style.
- Morningstar Ownership Zone – A graphical tool that analyzes each share in a fund’s portfolio within the Morningstar Style Box.
- Morningstar Analyst Rating: An analysis looking at the future of a fund by Morningstar expressed with a rating of Gold, Silver, Bronze, Neutral or Negative.
Who is Morningstar for?
Morningstar offers products and services to individual investors, advisers and entities that serve them.
- Individuals use Morningstar to make informed investment decisions, knowing all the important facts, with completely independent information.
- Financial advisers and other investment professionals can find tools on Morningstar to help them research, analyze, present and support their investment ideas.
- Entities (be they mutual funds, media companies, banks or insurers) also use Morningstar to find complete and independent information.