Using Morningstar and PrincipiaPro with FastTrack

    last updated 04/10/2014

Morningstar has a powerful fundamental utility called for selecting and organizing mutual funds and stocks

You can reach them at 

Phone: 800-735-0700 
Outside the U.S. call 312-696-6000

Many investment advisers and a few individuals use this program (it is pricey).. This document discusses using Morningstar selection techniques to pick a list of funds to view within FT4Web.

Step1. Select a list of issues from Morningstar

Use their sieve function or whatever technique you like within PrincipiaPro to create a sieve search to select a group of issues

Once all are selected, choose the Export.

Export the file to a place and name of your choosing. Just be sure you know where to find it.

Start FastTrack and right-click the Issue List to Load data from a file.

Be sure to select "All files" at the bottom of the Open dialog so you can see all files including the one you exported from Principia. Select the exported file

What you will see is that the list will become populated with the Morningstar issues.

• Issues in lowercase are NOT in the FastTrack databases. These may never have been added or may have been discontinued by the fund companies since your Principia CD was published.

• You may get an extraneous line like the "-" symbol. In this case, Morningstar listed a "-" in the Ticker column instead of the ticker symbol. Simply click on this line and hit µ (delete key) to remove it.

• FastTrack does no include all classes of funds. If Principia has selected the B Class, there may be an A class within FT that is an acceptable substitute.

One Common use of such lists to the compute an AVG

When the Issue List is loaded with the desired funds, enter the symbol AVG in a ColorBar Cell to compute an average of the issues. For more about averaging. click here.

What you see in the above chart is a red AVG line that performs much better than the S&P 500 in green from inception to the 03/30/01 reporting period for the Principia CD used in this exercise.

Does this exercise have Predictive Value?

The red line is the 5-Star Small Cap Growth AVG from PrincipiaPro as shown in the prior chart. The green line is the s-star AVG. The Relative strength chart shows the 5-Star having a sizable advantage since 1996 over the 3-Star. However, the difference between the two since the 3/30/01 rating was minimal in 2001 and nonexistent for the 2002-2003 period.