If you've been following Morningstar's ISA Week and you want to start taking advantage of tax-free investing, we've got several tools that can help you do your homework. Many open-ended vehicles and closed-end funds offer monthly savings plans that allow you to drip-feed your assets into the investment at regular, convenient intervals.
If you know which areas you wish to invest in, you can use our Fund Screener to screen the fund universe for funds that suit your portfolio needs—each Fund Report will tell you whether it is ‘ISA-able’ under its Fees section. Morningstar's ISA-eligible Fund Quickrank tool allows you to rank over 4,000 OEICs available for purchase in an ISA by various criteria, including past performance, total expense ratio and initial minimum fee. Both these tools will show you at a glance which of your search results have been rated by Morningstar fund analysts. In addition to the Morningstar star rating, a quantitative measure, our analysts also research funds on qualitative measures. To easily find which ISA-eligible funds have achieved Morningstar's highest qualitative rating, Elite, simply rank the ISA Fund Quickrank by Qualitative Rating.
Don't forget that open-ended funds and unit trusts aren't the only investment vehicles suited to an ISA wrapper. You might also want to consider an ISA-wrapped closed-end fund or investment trust, in which case use our CEF Screener to find funds that fit your investment criteria. You can easily check that each fund is ISA-eligible in the fees section of its fund report--see BlackRock Greater Europe Investment Trust as an example--as well as finding more information on its management fees and total expense ratio.
Finally, one of our most powerful tools is Portfolio Manager. This allows you to create and track your portfolio, while monitoring whether any of your underlying holdings have stock overlap or whether you are heavily invested in one particular asset, region or style. You may be surprised at the results--are you as diversified as you think? Using our Instant X-Ray tool will give you an instant illustration of the basic characteristics of your portfolio, specifically its asset allocation, and show you at a glance how buying or selling a particular investment might change the portfolio’s overall exposure to different investment styles.
All our tools are free to use, but you need to be registered with Morningstar.co.uk to save your portfolio so that you can revisit it at your convenience. Register here and view all our tools here.