Morningstar’s New Fund Ratings

Morningstar Inc. known as a leader in providing mutual fund analysis for the investment community and consumers, recently introduced a new system. The well know star ratings of providing 1- 5 stars based upon mutual fund’s past performance, has been helpful to some people at evaluating mutual fund choices.  Past performance is often no indication of future performance, but merely helps to evaluate how well they compared to other similar mutual funds.  The new “Gold, Silver, Bronze, Neutral or Negative” ratings are intended to help predict which funds will outperform their peers. Although Morningstar has a wide range of analytical capabilities and services to draw from, but until they have a lengthy track record of successful predicting over several market cycles, this writer remains sceptical. The Morningstar fund full reports provide a whole host of useful information to be considered along with these ratings. Consumers can subscribe to the mutual fund analysis software service to obtain their own reports, or ask their investment advisor for them.