CHICAGO, Sept. 18, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- At its fifth annual ETF Conference, Morningstar, Inc. (NASDAQ: MORN), a leading provider of independent investment research, today introduced the industry's first strategic beta exchange-traded product (ETP) classification system to help investors better identify, compare, and analyze strategic beta investment products. The company also published "A Global Guide to Strategic Beta Exchange-Traded Products," its first global landscape report about strategic beta ETPs.

Ben Johnson, Morningstar's director of manager research for passive strategies, said, "The need to define, measure, and scrutinize the strategic beta space has increased as investors have flocked to these products and they've grown more complex. Investors need to undertake the same degree of due diligence when evaluating strategic beta products as they would for active investment managers. We've created a strategic beta classification system to help investors identify the strategies that straddle the active/passive divide."

Morningstar defines strategic beta as a class of investment products that track indexes that seek to either improve performance or alter the level of risk relative to a standard benchmark, representing a fast-growing middle ground of the active-to-passive spectrum. Morningstar Direct(SM), Morningstar Office(SM), and Morningstar® Advisor Workstation(SM), the company's investment platforms for institutional investors and advisors, now include the new classification system and related data points. Clients of Morningstar® Data will be able to license the data points later this month.

Clients can identify, screen, and search for ETPs at three strategy attribute levels. The system first identifies strategic beta products as the investment style, then by the strategic objective of the underlying benchmark, and then the strategic objective at a more granular level. Strategy and sub-strategy classifications include:


    --  Return-Oriented: Strategies that try to improve returns or isolate a
        specific source of return relative to a benchmark. The strategies
        include: Value, Growth, Momentum, Quality, Fundamentals, Dividend
        Screened/Weighted, Earnings Weighted, Revenue Weighted, Expected
        Returns, Shareholder Yield, and Multi-Factor.
    --  Risk-Oriented: Strategies that try to increase or decrease the level of
        risk relative to a benchmark. The strategies include: Minimum
        Volatility/Variance, Low/High Beta, Risk Weighted, Risk Parity, Maximum
        Diversification, and De-Correlation.
    --  Other: A wide variety of strategies, which are not return- or
        risk-oriented. The strategies include: Equal Weighted, Non-Traditional
        Commodity, Non-Traditional Fixed Income, and Multi-Asset.

"Our new system for classifying strategic beta investment products will help investors understand their options and make more informed investing decisions. Because strategic beta products exhibit a variety of investment styles, the Morningstar classification system can help investors compare similar strategies and evaluate investments within the context of their traditional Morningstar category," Johnson said.

Morningstar's report, "A Global Guide to Strategic Beta Exchange-Traded Products," examines trends in asset growth, asset flows, product development, and fees by region; assesses the origins of strategic beta and the various types of risk that these strategies look to control; and provides a practical guide to analyzing strategic beta ETPs.

Key highlights of the landscape report include:


    --  As of June 30, 2014, Morningstar identified 673 strategic beta ETPs in
        its database, representing approximately $396 billion in assets
        worldwide.
    --  Strategic beta ETPs account for 19 percent of U.S. ETP assets and just
        1.5 percent of ETP assets in the Asia-Pacific region.
    --  Dividend screened/weighted ETPs have the most assets among strategic
        beta investment products in every region--United States, Canada, Europe,
        and Asia-Pacific--examined in the report.
    --  There is a positive correlation between the adoption rate of strategic
        beta ETPs and the stage of development of a region's ETP market and its
        asset management industry at large.
    --  Strategic beta ETPs tend to charge expense ratios that are more
        competitive than their comparable actively managed peers, though in some
        cases only marginally lower.

To access Morningstar's global landscape report about strategic beta, please click here. More information, including a guide to strategic beta and recent commentary, is available at http://global.morningstar.com/StrategicBetaPressKit. Morningstar's Johnson will host a series of webinars throughout the rest of the year; to attend the first webinar on Oct. 21 at 10 a.m. CT, please register here. Morningstar also offers a series of strategic beta indexes, such as the Morningstar® Wide Moat Focus Index(SM) and a number of factor, style, dividend, volatility, and momentum indexes.

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 products and services for individual investors, financial advisors, asset managers, and retirement plan providers and sponsors. Morningstar provides data on approximately 473,000 investment offerings, including stocks, mutual funds, and similar vehicles, along with real-time global market data on more than 12 million equities, indexes, futures, options, commodities, and precious metals, in addition to foreign exchange and Treasury markets. Morningstar also offers investment management services through its investment advisory subsidiaries and had approximately $169 billion in assets under advisement and management as of June 30, 2014. The company has operations in 27 countries.

©2014 Morningstar, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Media Contact:
 Nadine Youssef, +1 312-696-6601 or nadine.youssef@morningstar.com

SOURCE Morningstar, Inc.