Many business librarians will be familiar with the library edition of Morningstar Mutual Funds from their print reference collection. Morningstar have taken their popular print source and made it easy to use on the Web. They have also added some pizzazz to the product, which allows users to do much more than is possible with the print source. After all, this is what makes online products more interesting than their print counterparts.
To begin the library edition, investors have three search options:
- 1.
1 Screeners;
- 2.
2 Reports; and
- 3.
3 the Portfolio X‐ray.
The reports will be the most familiar to the print source users, while the other two are quite unique and allow powerful searching for investors. All are quite easy to use and will allow library patrons to leave with good, current information. The site is updated daily with closing prices for both stocks and funds.
“Screeners” identifies stocks or mutual funds that meet requested needs. Investors can create their own fund screens with the Morningstar Screener, or they can use built‐in screens to locate stocks or funds. Here’s how it works. After selecting “Screeners” from the main menu, investors are presented with a pull‐down menu, where they can select the first limit (“screen”) to apply to their search from a list of 50 choices in five major categories. The categories include:
- 1.
1 General (Fund name, Fund category, Style box, etc.);
- 2.
2 Ratings (Morningstar ratings, Risk, Additional Morningstar ratings);
- 3.
3 Performance (Annual returns, Tax efficiency, Standard deviation, etc.);
- 4.
4 Portfolio (Composition, Per cent assets, Turnover ratio, etc.); and
- 5.
5 Management (Fees and expenses, Minimum purchase, Fund size, etc.).
For instance, if a user selects minimum purchase price from the Management category, a pop‐up window opens where they can select the data, the condition (equal to, less than, greater than, etc.), and the value (number or word). As an example, a search on minimum purchase price of less than $1,000 retrieved 8,217 funds. This process can then be repeated to further narrow the fund choices. If users apply another screen, they have the option to use “and” or “or” before applying the screen. They can then repeat this process until all screens are applied and then view the results.
While this may sound complicated in text, it is quite easy to visualize on the monitor. Morningstar provides ten built‐in screens to use as well. For example, the search on “portfolio anchors”, which creates a search using six different screens, resulted in 44 funds. In any case, the results list provides investors with links to get to the reports on the fund as described below.
“Reports” will be the most familiar to investors, as this presents the familiar one‐page reports from the print source in electronic form. There are several ways to access the reports, including by fund name or ticker symbol, or by entering keywords from the fund investors are looking for. Also, the results from the Screeners search, described earlier, lead to the reports. The results page will bring up the snapshot of the fund searched, which has the familiar graph of an investment over time and the style box. Other statistical information is presented in the snapshot as well. Along the top are tabs to navigate to other areas of the documents, including the analyst’s research, ratings and diagnostics. Each page repeats this menu format for easy navigation to other parts of the data. A print icon is also provided for ease of printing the results.
The most unique feature of the library edition is “Portfolio X‐Ray.” Here is where investors can input two or more stocks and/or mutual funds to see how they work together as a portfolio. To try this, your reviewer input several of his mutual funds to see how they were working together. Users should enter the ticker symbols of the securities to x‐ray and the allocation for each holding. A handy look‐up link where they can search the securities by name is provided. The results are a great summary of investors’ holdings. One of the interesting choices is the stock intersection, that is, the percentage of stocks repeated in each of the funds. A very useful feature, this is the highlight of the online edition of Morningstar.
In summary, Morningstar Library Edition is an easy to use, yet powerful tool for investors. The advantages over the print version are many. Online updating is daily, while the print source comes out weekly and then has to be filed. Also, more than one person can use this resource at once, and it can be authenticated to off‐campus users via a proxy server. Libraries serving a large clientele of investors should strongly consider Morningstar Library Edition as one of their offerings.
