Morningstar joins US parent online

Morningstar Australia will soon be on the web. The front end of its “moms and pops” site will go live in March while its on-line offering to advisers will be avail-able later in the year.

Morningstar Australia will soon be on the web. The front end of its “moms and pops” site will go live in March while its on-line offering to advisers will be avail-able later in the year.

Morningstar’s managing director Graham Rich says the adviser site will leverage off the tools and architecture that Chicago-based parent Morningstar Inc is building to take the clients of its Principia software onto the web.

The consumer orientated web site will be an extension of the Morningstar fund ta-bles found in the Australian press.

“Obviously, there’s limited space in print media, but the web overcomes that, and also allows investors to customise the information. For example, they can rank funds by Morningstar Star Rating, or by the latest returns,” Rich says.

In January, executives from Morningstar Australia visited Chicago, where they were “walked through” new developments, including the Principia research soft-ware, which is designed specifically for financial planners and is currently being migrated to the web.

“We recognise that the role of advisers is changing. In the past, they had access to more information than their clients. These days, however, what’s important is knowing what to do with all the information,” says Don Phillips, chief executive of Morningstar in the US.

Principia does many of things done by Total-Access, Morningstar Australia’s cur-rent fund research software, and much more.

Phillips says it allows advisers to stipulate their own parameters. For example, they can ask it to tell them when a portfolio manager changes, or when the average cash in a portfolio drops below 10 per cent or when exposure to the IT sector jumps above 20 per cent.

“The last thing that advisers want is to be caught unawares when their clients come across new information,” Phillips says. Instead, they need to notify clients first and advise on how the portfolio can be modified.

Another of Morningstar’s new developments heading to Australia is ClearFuture, a retirement planning tool which only went live on the web two weeks ago and which is designed for the US 401(k) market.

Phillips says one of its unique features is the ability to identify if a portfolio is overexposed to a particular stock, sector or asset class.

He says many investors buy a selection of funds off the previous year’s leaders list, believing that this will give them diversification benefits. These funds, however, may all have a heavy holding of a particular stock, say, Microsoft, leaving inves-tors overweight to one company and one sector, especially if they also have direct holdings in Microsoft.