As you may have seen in the financial media recently, Morningstar UK has been appointed Sector Monitoring Organisation to IMA.
Following a successful bid, and starting on 1st October this year, Morningstar UK will be managing the data collection, processing, and reporting of all portfolio holdings for all open-end funds available to investors in the UK that are classified to IMA sectors. This will include considerable data monitoring, collection, and reporting work around fund derivatives holdings, which we believe to be a particularly crucial as the use of derivatives in investment management continues to rise and issues around their transparency grow.
In this regard, we’ll be working with the IMA to develop rules for monitoring funds that are not suited to long-only portfolio monitoring, including the identification of the increasing number of funds using derivatives for investment purposes beyond efficient portfolio management and the development of a recommended disclosure standard for derivatives holdings.
The collection and analysis of portfolio holdings is at the core of who we are and what we do. For the past 10 years, we’ve led the collection and analysis of full fund portfolio holdings across the UK and Europe based on our fundamental belief that investors need transparent and consistent analysis of full portfolio holdings in order to fully understand their investments. We very much look forward to bringing this expertise to bear in our additional capacity as Sector Monitoring Organisation to the broader industry.