How to Find the Right Funds for Your Portfolio

TUTORIAL: Morningstar's Fund Screener picks funds that exactly meet your personal investment criteria

Morningstar.co.uk Editors 31 March, 2015 | 7:00AM
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Welcome to the homepage of Morningstar.co.uk. This is the second tutorial video of the series. In the first video, we took you through how to sign up to Morningstar.co.uk., create your first portfolio and add and track investments. 

Now let's take a look at how we can search for investment ideas using the Fund Screener tool. The Fund Screener allows me to select my own criteria to screen the fund universe. Let's say I want to use Morningstar.co.uk to find the cheapest, highest-rated UK equity income funds. 

I'm going to start off by going to the funds or “OEIC/Unit Trusts” tab. This is in the middle of the menu bar on the Morningstar.co.uk homepage. On all the Morningstar cover pages, the left column shows Morningstar editorial, education and investment ideas; and the middle column shows some of our investment idea tools. 

Click ‘Screen for Funds’. Within the Fund Screener, there is a list of various criteria that I can change to run a screen that meets my needs. For example, Morningstar Ratings, specific risk metrics, the investment style and even the fees charged by the fund. 

In order to find the highest-rated, cheapest UK equity income funds, I'm going to start by selecting only those funds that have earned the highest Morningstar Analyst Ratings. So I'm going to click Gold, Silver and Bronze. You can choose as many or as few of the criteria as you like. I want to look for UK equity income funds, so I will change the Morningstar Category to ‘UK Equity Income’. You will see instantly at the top that the results have now gone down to 102. 

I also want to exclude funds of funds from my search. So I select ‘No’ under Fund of Funds. I'm looking for a fund I can hold in an ISA and drip feed relatively small amounts of money into each month. So I'm going to set a minimum initial purchase of £500. This brings the total fund share class results that meet my criteria to nine. To see this list, I click search at the bottom of the page. 

On the results page, I have various tabs that can help me see more data on these funds. For example, the Performance tab. Any data column can be sorted by clicking on that column's header. For example, if I click on Year to Date Return, it will sort the results by the highest year to date return first. 

Let’s say I quite like the look of the Fidelity MoneyBuilder Dividend fund, so I'm going to add this to my portfolio as I'd like to keep track of its performance. To add any fund to your portfolio, simply check the box next to the fund name and then click Add To My Portfolio. 

If you want to see more detail on any specific fund, simply click on the fund name. This takes me to the Morningstar Fund Report for that specific fund, where I can see more data, including the Morningstar Analyst opinion under the Morningstar Analyst Research tab. 

Non-Premium members will only see the first few paragraphs of the report summarising our analysts’ opinion. However, members of Morningstar Premium will see a full in-depth report from our Morningstar analysts. This covers our five pillars – People, Parent, Process, Performance and Price. 

Alternatively, to see the fund report on any specific fund, I can use the Search box. I can select the result from the drop-down that appears and this will take me directly to that fund's report. 

In the next video, I'll be showing you how to use the Equity Quickrank tool to search for more investment ideas for your portfolio.

The information contained within is for educational and informational purposes ONLY. It is not intended nor should it be considered an invitation or inducement to buy or sell a security or securities noted within nor should it be viewed as a communication intended to persuade or incite you to buy or sell security or securities noted within. Any commentary provided is the opinion of the author and should not be considered a personalised recommendation. The information contained within should not be a person's sole basis for making an investment decision. Please contact your financial professional before making an investment decision.

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