Fund Centre home page
The Fund Centre home page gives you access to a large range of information and tools available to you online, including:
Fund search
Located at the top of the Fund Centre home page you will find the fund search. You can search in a variety of ways; either by browsing through the Fund Directory, entering a keyword into our Quick Search or narrowing your search by criteria with our Fund Finder.
The Fund Directory: The Fund Directory contains an alphabetical list of all funds. By clicking on a letter, at the top of the search, you will be able to see what funds are available. Please note that groups whose names start with numbers will appear under the title “Other”.
Quick Search: The Quick Search allows you to search for an individual fund by type (UK and Offshore), category, company and keyword or symbol. Simply select your preference from the lists in the dropdowns and/or enter your search query into the form and click search, alternatively you can search for ‘All’ funds.
Fund Finder: The Fund Finder allows searches to be performed based on user-defined criteria which includes; performance and risk data over a select period of time, ratings from 3rd party rating houses to measure risk further and fund attributes including charges, domicile, fund size and currency. Simply click the Fund Finder button within the search form to define a search.
The result’s page lists all the funds which match your query. You can view a fund’s details in our Fund Fact Sheets by clicking on either the chart icon or the hyperlinked fund name or you can compare the funds which match your search criteria by ticking the checkboxes to the left of each fund and clicking on the “Compare” button.
Latest Fund News
This section contains the latest headlines from a respected news feed and details key developments in the funds industry – simply click on the headline to go to the full story.
Top 10 Risers & Fallers
The top 10 risers & fallers highlight those funds which over the course of a 1 and 3 year time period have performed well or poorly. Performance is based on 1 year default. Risers and fallers from a selection of different fund categories are available through the selection options within the drop down menu situated above the top 10 table and the number of funds that are available per category is displayed below.
Fund Fact Sheet
The Fund Fact Sheets provide a wide range of data fundamental data relating to the fund you choose. The fact sheets are split into four key areas; attributes, performance, risk and ratings. Navigating through this information is done via the linked tabs at the top of each page and there is the option to print the entire fact sheet by clicking the Printer Friendly Fact Sheet link and icon at the top of each page.
Attributes
The Attributes tab presents an overview of key information about the fund, including; current price, top 10 holdings’ and asset allocation. Additionally you will be able to view the fund’s objective and find out any associated charges should you invest:
Price Details: The price details include current prices based on the valuation date displayed, previous close, percentage changes since previous valuation, the gross and net yields as well as the 12 month’s high and low.
Fund Information: Fundamental fund information including; fund type, sector, currency, size and inception date.
Holdings; include the top ten fund constituents and their percentage weight for that fund.
Asset Allocation: The allocation of the funds holdings by sector.
Investing in the Fund: Displays the costs associate with funds and what type of investment options are available to them, which includes; initial and annual charges, minimal initial investment, if there are any minimal regular investment requirements as well as any exit charges.
Fund Management: Details pertaining to the fund management company the contact details of the fund manager(s) within that company and the pricing and dealing frequency of each fund.
Performance
The Performance tab displays the performance of a fund over a period of time. This period can be configured:
Cumulative Table: Cumulative performance of the fund since inception.
Discrete Table: The discrete performance of the fund over the past five years.
Cumulative Line Chart: The Cumulative Line Chart displays the funds performance over a select period of time. Defaulted to 3 years the time-period can be altered from a range of options in the view dropdown menu, once a different time-period is selected to view a loading status icon will display in the foot of the graph. A dropdown option is currently in development to change the Cumulative Line Chart to plot historical price data.
Discrete Table: Charts the discrete performance for each of the previous five years compared against a composite benchmark where applicable.
Risk
The Risk tab is divided into two parts which include the Risk Details table and XY Scatter graph.
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Risk details: These are statistical measurements intended to help investors determine the risk-reward profile of a fund.
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Standard deviation: Standard deviation measures the volatility (risk) applied to the investment's annual rate of return. The standard deviation tells us how much the return on the fund is deviating from the expected normal returns.
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Sharpe: Developed by Nobel Laureate William F. Sharpe to measure risk-adjusted performance. The calculation is made by subtracting the risk-free rate from the rate of return for a portfolio and dividing the result by the standard deviation of the portfolio returns.
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R-Squared: A statistical measure that represents the percentage of a fund or security's movements that can be explained by movements in a benchmark index.
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Alpha: The amount by which an investment’s actual return exceeds or falls short of its expected return given its level of risk. A positive alpha indicates that an investment has performed better than expected given its beta; whereas, a negative alpha indicates poorer performance.
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Beta: A measure of a fund’s sensitivity relative to the market benchmark. If the return on a portfolio co-varies exactly with the market it will have a beta equal to 1 and the portfolio will be said to be as risky as the market itself. A beta of less than 1 indicates that the portfolio is less risky than the market. If it is greater than 1, the portfolio is said to be more risky than the market.
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Treynor: A measure of the portfolios excess return with respect to its beta co-efficient, which is a measure of the volatility of a portfolio relative to an underlying index. It takes into account only systematic risk (risk associated with the market) whereas the Sharpe Measure considers total risk developed by Jack Treynor.
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VaR Level (5%): Or Value at Risk measures of the average distance between each of a set of data points and their mean value; equal to the sum of the squared deviations of each member of a population from the population mean.
XY Scatter
The XY Scatter graph displays the standard deviation and performance between a fund and a select benchmark. The time period for the standard deviation can be changed according to preference from the selections in the dropdown menu including; since launch, 1 year weekly and 3 years monthly.
Ratings
The Ratings tab allows you to set criteria based on the ratings from Bestinvest. Please note that not all funds are rated.
Ratings information is sourced from Ratings Agencies and is provided for information purposes only. The Ratings Agencies do not provide recommendations or advice on funds. Fund investment values can go down as well as up, and past performance is not an indicator of future performance.
The Exchange does not provide recommendations or advice on funds and is not responsible for the content of third party websites, materials relating to investments or any other matter disseminated by third parties or the products/services such third parties may offer. You should seek professional advice before making any investment decision.
Best Invest
Rating based on a mixture of quantitative and qualitative analysis. Before a fund is rated, the Best invest research team conduct a face to face interview with the fund manager. Five Star - Exceptional - the manager is amongst the best of his peers and has a long track record of consistent out performance. Four Star - Very High Quality - the manager is very talented and the fund a strong recommendation. Three Star - High Quality - the fund is expected to be in the top quartile over periods of three years or more. Two Star - Moderate - the fund is expected to perform broadly inline with its benchmark or insufficient confidence in the manager to justify a higher rating. One Star - Poor - the fund is expected to under perform.
Best invest Fund Manager MRI: The Best invest Manager Record Index (MRI) measures the likelihood that a fund manager is adding value through their decisions. MRIs above 90% show a high degree of confidence in a manager's abilities. Conversely MRIs of below 10% suggest the manager could likely have done better by guessing. The MRI is calculated using data over a manager's entire career in a given sector and incorporates manager moves.
Fund Comparison
On every search results page where more than one fund is returned the option to compare those funds against one another is available simply by checking the tick boxes next to any funds and clicking the compare button directly above or below each group of search results.
The fund comparison result pages charts the performance of each fund which can be customized using the Time Period and Currency dropdowns. Year to date, 1 month through to 5 year performance data is available as well as currency, fund size, fund type, initial and annual charges, and ratings for comparison.
A maximum of 10 funds can be compared at any one time. The default time period for performance comparison is 1 year. If any fund(s) does not have data for the complete time period of the comparison that particular fund will not be plotted as part of the graph.