Cannot retrieve sector information

[tktf]

Hi,

I'm trying out the retrieval of sector information in the FM 2014 beta. I use Canada Stockwatch for most of my price updates, so I have setup symbols that are compatible with that server. When I use the Edit/Internet Retrieve/Sectors... feature, I get very few successful responses.

Is this because Morningstar uses different symbols for the investments I'm trying to retrieve?

I have attached a sample Sector Retrieve Log.

Regards,
Steven

[Mark]

Hi Steven,

Unfortunately, yes. To retrieve sector information from Morningstar your symbols must be set to those as shown on the Morningstar site. I realize this isn't ideal... We'll have to give this some thought. We almost need a separate symbol for price retrieve, another symbol for sector retrieve, and maybe another for asset type retrieval. That is getting a bit complex though.

To work around this for now, all I can suggest is to temporarily change the symbols to those used on Morningstar, assuming they have them. (After you do the sector retrieve, you can change them back for price retrieval.) If they aren't from a US exchange, the symbol needs to include the exchange. For example, if you go and look up the LHR symbol that you have in your log, you will see from the URL that they use:

XTSX:LHR

as the symbol. The part before the ":" indicates the exchange.

Maybe a solution would be for us to add a "Morningstar" quote server, so you can just leave the symbol set to the Morningstar symbol for price/sector/asset type retrieval. We will investigate this.

[tktf]

Thanks for the response, Mark.

I have to tell you that one of the main reasons I'm interested in this latest beta is because of the ability to retrieve sector information automatically. Ideally, there would be some way to automatically determine the Morningstar symbol from the quote symbol, rather than having to enter multiple symbols (one for each use) manually. But I know that may be complicated to achieve.

Anyway, I'll wait to see what you come up with.

Regards,
Steven

[Mark]

Hi Steven,

We have added 2 new quote servers to help deal with this:

Morningstar - Stocks
Morningstar - Funds

So, you can use these quote servers, with the Morningstar symbols, and the symbols will be the same for the asset/sector retrieval. The next release will include these new quote servers.

[Mark]

Hi Steven,

The "Beta 5" release is now available here:

http://www.fundmanagersoftware.com/fm2014beta.html

which adds these new Morningstar servers.

[tktf]

Sounds great, Mark.

I'll give it a try.

[tktf]

Hi Mark,

I tried the beta 5 and it is a better but I still have some problems. First, it looks like the Morningstar quote server does not support all of my investments. I tried two funds:

Mawer Canadian Equity Fund A - I was able to find a symbol for this one on morningstar.ca (F0CAN05MUH) but not on morningstar.com. And this symbol worked with the morningstar fund quote server.

Mackenzie Cundill Recovery Fund C - The only symbol I could find for this one (again on morningstar.ca) was MFC842. This symbol did not work with the morningstar fund quote server.

Neither of these symbols worked with the Sector Retrieve function.

Second, I tried to retrieve sector information for some ETFs and they all seem to have come back as "uncategorized". Take a look at the attached log file (sectortoplog2.txt) for the list of symbols.

Some of the ETFs are bond funds. But CDZ, for example, is a canadian equity ETF. I would expect that some kind of sector breakdown could be obtained for that ETF.

If you can provide any guidance on how to get better/more complete sector information, that would be great.

Thanks.
Steven

[Mark]

Hi Steven,

The symbols must be available on morningstar.com to be able to be retrieved from either of the morningstar quote servers, or for retrieving sector/asset assignments. We aren't using morningstar.ca, only morningstar.com.

That log file didn't have CDZ? If you use the symbol of XTSE:CDZ, that works. I tested it here, and using that symbol it retrieved prices, asset types, and sectors. You do have to leave it specified as one of the "mutual fund" investment types for this to work. If you have it as an "Exchange Traded Fund", it currently gets skipped when doing the sector retrieval. This is a bug. We will have this fixed for the next release, so you can set it to an "Exchange Traded Fund" once we fix this.

So, please either wait for us to fix this bug, or change the investment types for your ETFs to "no load mutual fund", and set the symbol with the "XTSE:" prefix, and then the price/asset/sector retrieval should all work, assuming the symbol is on morningstar.com.

[tktf]

Thanks Mark. I guess I had two log files, one with some ETFs and I didn't attach both of the logs.

I will try your suggestion of marking the ETFs as mutual funds for now, just to test the retrieval.

Regards,
Steven

[tktf]

Hi Mark,

I tried your suggestion of marking ETFs and No Load Mutual Funds and that worked very well.

I still have a problem with bond ETFs. They are reported as FAILED (see attachment sectortoplog_bond_failed), even though the data was retrieved from the server - maybe because none of the "sectors" fall into the predefined list of sectors (?). For example, the XBB ETF returns a breakdown into the portion that is government bonds and corporate bonds.

It would be good if FM could recognize this kind of response and put the fund into "uncategorized" instead of reporting a failure.

Regards,
Steven

[Mark]

Hi Steven,

Glad things have gone better.

Yes, Morningstar uses different asset types and sectors for "Fixed Income" type investments versus investments in stocks. These type of fixed income securities will fail, as they're using different assets/sectors.

On the retrieval dialog there is an option to either put failed investments into <uncategorized> or leave them alone. It will still report as a failure, but you can have it move them into <uncategorized>. Maybe we could have another investment property to mark investments to not be retrieved for assets/sectors, even if they are designated as a fund/stock/etf. You can still assign these failed investments to any sector/asset type you want. It would be a manual assignment, and when you retrieve you'd want to set that "on failure" option to leave these alone.

[Mark]

Hi Steven,

FYI. Beta 6 is now available, which fixes the ETF bug. You can now leave your ETFs assigned as ETFs, and have them retrieve asset/sector info from Morningstar. The beta 6 is available here:

http://www.fundmanagersoftware.com/fm2014beta.html