2 FM 2014 questions

[paulk]

Hi Mark

Upgraded to FM 2014 Advisor and have a couple questions:

With the Asset Type retrieval feature, is that only something that will work through the "Asset Type Retrieval" Dialog? My concern is that I have my asset types set manually and like them the way they are. I don't want FM changing them if I update historical prices or retrieve sector information.

With regards to the Sector Report, is there a way to exclude certain types of investments or alternatively to add support for fixed income funds and etfs? I am having a ton of tickers come back as "unclassified" and I believe they are all fixed income investments. I would like to be able to exclude those asset classes from the report somehow so I could customize the report to show the sector breakdown of the equity portion of a given portfolio. Is this possible?

Thanks

[Mark]

Hi paulk,

Yes, the asset types are only retrieved when you go through "Edit / Internet Retrieve / Asset Types...". Retrieving historical or current pricing does not do anything with asset types.

Any investment classified as fixed income type, won't retrieve asset or sector assignments. They use different asset/sector definitions as compared to equity based investments. I'd appreciate feedback on how you'd prefer to see fixed income type investments assigned. With asset types for equities there are 9 different asset types reported by morningstar. They have a different set of 9 types for fixed income investments. There is a similar situation for sector definitions. We could either have a breakdown of all assets/sectors separately, or maybe it would be better to just lump all fixed income into a "fixed income" bucket for comparison purposes against equity investments. I'm guessing most people would prefer to see the breakdown of all asset/sectors...

The Sector Allocation report doesn't allow filtering, but you can create the equivalent report as a Custom report, and memorize it. In the report settings, set it to not sub-total, and list by Sector. The Custom report does allow you to filter, so you could put all your fixed income type investments into a user-defined sector that you create, and then either exclude this, or not, from this report.

[paulk]

Thanks as usual for the quick and helpful response.

With the breakdowns I would prefer the option to not have to lump all fixed income into a "fixed income" category but rather have the option to use the Morningstar categories if I wanted to.

[Mark]

Okay, thanks for the feedback. We'll see about improving this feature to handle fixed income better.