The Morningstar Direct team is in the final stages of preparing the Direct 3.4 release which will include a major enhancement, performance reporting. Performance reporting gives our clients a streamlined process for creating and running daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly fund performance reports. In addition, clients will also have the option to view "obsolete" securities that were liquidated or merged in the past.

Please contact your account team for more information.

We are excited to announce that Morningstar EnCorr 9.4 will be released on April 8. We will provide more information including a training schedule and a new link upon release. As always, please follow the protocol outlined by your IT department regarding downloads. The new release includes risk budgeting functionality, forecasting using log-stable returns distribution assumption, enhanced resampling, expanded operational data among many other features and enhancements.

Please click here for a complete list of the new features in Morningstar EnCorr 9.4.

On April 1, we replaced our business risk rating with a fair value uncertainty rating in all Morningstar stock analyst reports. The new rating conveys our level of confidence to estimate a company's future cash flows. New reports on stocks we cover include an uncertainty rating of low, medium, high, very high, or extreme uncertainty.

For more information about this change, including the four key attributes we consider when deriving our new uncertainty ratings, please click here.

We recently reviewed all open-end funds in our European database and identified about 1,000 funds with structural characteristics of hedge funds. Over the next few months, we will be moving these funds to our hedge fund database to facilitate appropriate peer group analysis and ranking.

The 68 funds with an open-end star rating will no longer be rated in this universe. All 1,000 funds will be assigned a hedge fund category and will receive a hedge fund rating, provided the methodology requirements are met.

Please note that NASDAQ has cancelled its planned stock symbol system change.

Details from NASDAQ can be seen here.

Please contact your account team for additional details.

Effective March 31, 2008, Morningstar modified the methodology for Investor Returns in order to accommodate fund mergers. Under the previous methodology, we treated the movement of net assets from the merging fund to the surviving fund as an inflow of cash. The revised methodology addresses this issue by creating pre-merger net assets and returns that reflect the behavior of both funds.

An updated methodology document will be available on our corporate web site shortly.

Morningstar Direct 3.3 has been released to Morningstar Direct 3.1 users. Users with administrative download rights have received the download link via e-mail. Please follow your organization’s protocol for executing downloads and check with your IT department for administrative rights if necessary. If you do not have the right to update the application, please work with your IT resources to accommodate an alternate release date. The newest release includes improved aggregate functionality, new alerts capability, enhancements to Report Builder, new charts, increased data coverage, and enhanced coverage of shorts and derivatives in portfolio statistics.

View enhancement details

We are pleased to offer Morningstar Direct clients data on three new open-end mutual fund sub-universes available for sale in the following countries— Iceland, Greece and Lithuania. Close to 7,000 open-end mutual funds are covered from these countries. The data can be found in the Open-End Funds Universe by country in Morningstar Direct 3.3.

Please contact your Morningstar account manager to learn more.

With mutual fund capital gains taxes at an all-time high, the Tax Barometer can help investors decide, from a tax standpoint, which investment might best serve their needs— a separate account or a mutual fund. By illustrating the percentage of tax overhang in nine domestic-equity Morningstar mutual fund categories, the Tax Barometer helps investors to analyze their investment options.

Please click here to learn more.

Morningstar is currently tracking more than 280 "leveraged net long" investment vehicles across our various proprietary databases. While we are working on ehancements to enable our clients to search on this data point, a list of the available investments is available upon request.

Please contact your account team for details.

We are restructuring our variable annuity rider description data to employ the use of “tags” to separate the description into a series of categories and sub-categories. Currently, rider descriptions are only available in paragraph format. This categorization will allow our clients to more easily search for and compare the features of death and living benefit riders in different policies. This enhancement is currently available to Morningstar Annuity Research Center clients and will be available to Licensed Data Clients in April deliveries.

Please contact your account team for details.

March 4, 2008—Morningstar announced Morningstar� Site Builder, a new Web-based platform consisting of Morningstar’s financial advisor tools, content, and reports that investment firms can seamlessly add to their existing advisor Web sites. Site Builder includes a broad range of Morningstar investment research, portfolio analysis tools, and sales and educational materials to augment firms’ online Web properties. Site Builder can be integrated into an existing Web site’s framework to encompass a firm’s brand identity, design elements and style sheets.

Press Release

March 24, 2008—Morningstar Investment Services, a registered investment advisor and wholly owned subsidiary of Morningstar, Inc., introduced a managed account service consisting of a line-up of five actively managed portfolios that use exchange-traded funds to meet a wide range of investor needs.

Press Release

March 26, 2008— Schwab Institutional, a division of Charles Schwab and Co., Inc., has established a relationship with Morningstar Investment Services to make its portfolio management services available on Schwab Institutional’s enhanced managed account services platform. Investment advisors doing business with Schwab Institutional may now access Morningstar Investment Services’ line of actively managed mutual fund, stock, and exchange-traded fund portfolios to meet a variety of investment needs for individuals.

Press Release

The 6th annual Morningstar Investment Conference will be held on June 11, 2008 at the Carlu in Toronto. During the conference, advisors will learn strategies they can use to minimize the effects of market swings on investors and their portfolios. Although it is impossible to change the course of the markets, what investors and their advisors can control is how well they are prepared, strategically and psychologically, for the inevitable downturns. Speakers include Eric Bushell of CI Investments, John Embry of Sprott Asset Management, and Dennis Gartman of The Gartman Letter.

Click here for more information.