Morningstar awards

Public mutual menang award lagi..

Morningstar awards


PUBLIC Mutual Bhd picked up four out of the six awards given by Morningstar Inc, a US-based fund rating service, to the local fund industry.

Public Mutual picked up the awards for its Public Ittikal Fund and Malaysian Equity Public Growth Fund under the Equity cateogry.

Its Public Bond Fund and PB Balanced Fund also won in the fixed income and balanced category.

The other winners are MAAKL’s Progress Fund under the Malaysia Small Cap Equity and CIMB’s Islamic Balanced Fund.

Despite a full blown credit crunch, a banking crisis in the US and a plunging dollar, the rating service says the global equity markets last year managed to extend their bull run into its fifth year.

Overall, equity funds posted stronger returns than fixed income portfolios, says Morningstar Research Pte Ltd.

The release says returns in fixed income portfolios managed to pick up steadily over the course of 2007 as investors turned to safe haven assets during the sub-prime turmoil.

Insurance funds and closed-end funds were excluded. Other categories excluded are the money market, guaranteed fund, capital protected, absolute return and those with target dates.

The awards will be an annual event. However, the release says Morningstar does not wish to be in the position of giving awards to funds that have posted a strong one-year return, but have otherwise not delivered good results for investors.

“We also recognise that investors often use awards as a ‘buy’ signal, and we do not wish to steer them to offerings that may not be good long-term investments.

“This combination will ensure that the awards are given to funds which have earned strong one-year results, and have also shown they have the ability to earn strong long-term returns without undue risk,” the release says.

The release says it has selected those funds or fund groups that have added the most value.

They also evaluate each fund’s risk-adjusted returns over a longer period as well as the stability of the management team and the consistency of investment strategy.

Therefore, although the awards methodology emphasises the one-year period, funds must also have delivered strong three-and five-year risk adjusted returns in order to obtain an award.

Only funds with five-year performance history that are available for sale in Malaysia will be eligible to receive an award.

Consequently, only six categories were selected in 2007 as they met this basic requirement.

To generate more interest in the local unit trust market, Morningstar Asia, also launched its Malaysian website that covers the entire local unit trust market.

The free service, which initially represents more than 435 funds, is available to investors at http://my.morningstar.com.

Morningstar Asia is part of Morningstar Inc, which has operations in 18 countries.

The company offers Internet, software, and print-based products for individual investors, professional financial advisors, and institutional clients.

Morningstar also offers information on stocks, mutual funds, variable annuities, closed-end funds, exchange-traded funds, hedge funds, separate accounts, and college savings plans with data on more than 260,000 investment offerings worldwide.

Its Malaysian website contents includes a set of tools, such as fund screener, fund selector and fund quicktake report, which help investors to locate and determine suitability of investments.

It also features proprietary statistics, such as Morningstar rating and style box, and unbiased fund analyses.

A team of fund analysts and web experts will populate the site with market reviews, research reports, and timely data that will give investors a wealth of information about funds to help them make better investment decisions.

Jin Tian, chief executive officer of Morningstar Asia said, “The launch of our Morningstar Malaysia website is the first step in our effort to bring quality investment education and information to a country that is experiencing significant growth in unit trust investing.

Our site will be an excellent resource for investors, offering them investment education and information on unit trusts from the most trusted source in the US for more than 20 years.”

Morningstar opened its Asia headquarters operations in Hong Kong in April 2000.

The company employs approximately 500 people in Asia.