Morningstar Rolls Out Enhancements to Morningstar Direct, Adds Presentation Studio Interface for Creating Fully Customized Repor
September 21 2009 - 10:00AM
PR Newswire (US)
CHICAGO, Sept. 21 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Morningstar, Inc.
(NASDAQ: MORN), a leading provider of independent investment
research, today launched the latest version of Morningstar
Direct(SM), a Web-based global research platform that connects
institutional investment professionals directly to Morningstar's
full universe of investment research and data. The most significant
enhancement to Morningstar Direct is the Presentation Studio
interface, which allows asset managers, consultants, institutional
investors, and retirement plan sponsors to quickly and easily
create fully customized reports, presentations, and fact sheets
featuring their company's brand design. Presentation Studio allows
users to have full control over both the content and format of
reports--using professionally designed data tables and charts--to
communicate the data behind their research and recommendations. Key
features of the new Presentation Studio include: -- A complete
library of report book templates, allowing a user to analyze a
single investment or an entire peer group or lineup. -- Page
components that immediately populate a report book with current
data after an investment is selected for analysis. -- Changes to
time periods, investments, benchmarks, and other settings can be
made once and applied to the entire report book. -- "Drag and drop"
functionality, enabling users to place their choice of charts and
tables from the report book to create their presentation. -- Easily
resizable page features that allow users to include their logo,
disclaimer or notes, and apply their corporate color palette and
fonts. "With templates designed around users' workflow,
Morningstar's Presentation Studio can streamline the creation of
presentations, competitive analysis reports, and fact sheets," said
Bevin Desmond, president of institutional software for Morningstar.
"These new presentation capabilities make it easy and efficient for
our users to create professionally designed communications
materials. When you combine these new features with our
comprehensive data and functionality for peer, performance, and
risk analysis, Morningstar Direct provides investment professionals
with a single, comprehensive resource for analyzing investments and
communicating their findings to clients." In addition to
Presentation Studio, the latest version of Morningstar Direct
includes enhancements to the Performance Attribution feature, which
Morningstar introduced earlier this year. It now includes importing
of client accounts and portfolio holdings for daily attribution,
batch reporting, and Adobe PDF attribution reports. This allows
equity managers to compare the investment managers' contribution to
performance via security selection and allocation of assets versus
a benchmark. Another key innovation is total portfolio attribution.
This functionality allows users such as fund-of-fund managers to
review attribution at a macro level, evaluating investment
managers' role in performance via manager selection and asset
allocation versus a set of strategic investment policies.
Morningstar also added new investment data to Direct, including
historical assets data for separate accounts and its new
target-date fund series reports. Additionally, Morningstar Direct
now offers the option to change the platform's language settings to
English, Mandarin Chinese, or Italian. Launched in 2001,
Morningstar Direct offers centralized access to current and
historical data from the entire Morningstar global database. This
Web-based platform equips more than 950 institutions globally with
highly customizable tools for selecting, developing, and monitoring
investments. More information on Morningstar Direct can be found
at: global.morningstar.com/MorningstarDirect. About Morningstar,
Inc. Morningstar, Inc. is a leading provider of independent
investment research in North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia.
The company offers an extensive line of Internet, software, and
print-based products and services for individuals, financial
advisors, and institutions. Morningstar provides data on nearly
325,000 investment offerings, including stocks, mutual funds, and
similar vehicles, along with real-time global market data on more
than 4 million equities, indexes, futures, options, commodities,
and precious metals, in addition to foreign exchange and Treasury
markets. The company has operations in 19 countries and minority
ownership positions in companies based in three other countries.
2009 Morningstar, Inc. All rights reserved. MORN-P Media Contact:
Shawn Malayter, 312-696-6050 or DATASOURCE: Morningstar, Inc.
CONTACT: Shawn Malayter of Morningstar, Inc., +1-312-696-6050, Web
Site: http://www.morningstar.com/
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