I hope everyone had a nice Easter. I headed up to Hong Kong for Rugby Sevens which was a great experience. I spent five years living in Hong Kong when I was growing up and it is always nice to get back to such a great city.

We will be hosting a Facebook live event on 11 April at 12:30pm AEDT which features myself and Adam Fleck, our director of equity research in Australia. We will cover off on features available to premium subscribers with a special emphasis on our equity analyst team and rating methodology.

To join the event please visit and like our Facebook page here and simply visit our page on Wednesday 11 April. There will be an opportunity to ask us any questions you may have during the event. Additionally, please submit any questions or topic requests before the event to ymw@morningstar.com   

Below are some of the key activities that occurred at Morningstar during the month of March.

Enhancement to our “Build a portfolio” feature

In February we introduced a new tool to help our premium subscribers with portfolio construction and asset allocation decisions. The Wealth Forecasting Engine (“WFE”) is a sophisticated Morningstar tool that runs at least five hundred simulations of what may happen to a portfolio over a given time-period.

We chart the middle band of these simulations to give users a likely range of outcomes. The foundation of the tool are the five model portfolios that make up the Morningstar strategic asset allocation framework and our long-term capital market assumptions. Each of the five model portfolios is based on a unique risk, return and investment horizon and provides our recommended asset allocation across eight asset classes.

We recently implemented the first of our enhancements with pre-set fund screeners to surface our top-rated funds from each of the asset classes within the 5 portfolios. The fund screeners identify the managed funds that our analysts rate as Gold, Silver and Bronze. The Morningstar Analyst Rating is the summary of our forward-looking view of a managed fund. Premium subscribers and premium free trial members can find the new feature here. 

Return of the star ratings trigger graph

In March we transitioned our Equity Analyst Ratings to our Global Star Rating system. Just like our old ratings, the Star Ratings system represents a forward-looking opinion of a stock’s valuation and is calculated using the same logic as the word-based recommendations. Our 5-star ratings will align with our former recommendations, so that a 1-star rating replaces our Sell recommendation, and a 5-star rating lines up with our Buy recommendation. There is nothing that has changed about our Equity research team, coverage universe or the process they use to evaluate a stock.

Based on client feedback we have re-introduced a graphic that shows how price movements of a stock correspond to the various Morningstar Analyst Rating levels. Premium subscribers and premium trial members can view the re-introduced graphic in the “Current Research View” page of each stock within our coverage universe (for an example for CBA please see here). 

As always, I would love to hear feedback on any of our new or existing features and how we can continue to help you reach your investing goals. Please email me at ymw@morningstar.com  

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Mark LaMonica is the Individual Investor Product Manager in Australia

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