What Is the Morningstar Star Rating?

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What Is the Morningstar Star Rating?

The Morningstar star rating is a purely mathematical measure that shows how well a fund’s past returns have compensated shareholders for the amount of risk it has taken on. Morningstar fund analysts don’t assign Star Ratings and have no subjective input into the ratings, as they do into our forward-looking Morningstar Medalist Ratings. Morningstar doesn’t subtract stars from funds it doesn’t like or add stars when it does.

How it works

The Morningstar Rating™ is a measure of a fund’s risk-adjusted return, relative to similar funds. Funds are rated from one to five stars, with the best performers receiving five stars and the worst performers receiving a single star.

Morningstar gauges a fund’s risk by calculating a risk penalty for each fund based on "expected utility theory," a commonly used method of economic analysis. It assumes that investors are more concerned about a possible poor outcome than an unexpectedly good outcome, and those investors are willing to give up a small portion of an investment’s expected return in exchange for greater certainty.

Here is an example to illustrate it

Consider a simple example—a fund expected to return 10% each year. Investors are likely to receive 10%, but past variations in the fund’s return suggest there’s a chance they might end up with anywhere from 5% to 15%. While receiving more than 10% would be a pleasant surprise, most investors are likely to worry more about receiving less than 10%. Hence, they’d probably be willing to settle for a slightly lower return—say 9%—if they could be reasonably certain they’d receive that amount. If a fund expected to return 10% each year, but variations in its past returns suggested a narrower 8% to 12% range, investors wouldn’t want to forego as much of the expected return in exchange for increased certainty.

This concept is the basis for how Morningstar adjusts for risk. A "risk penalty" is subtracted from each fund’s total return, based on the variation in its month-to-month return during the rating period, with an emphasis on downward variation. The greater the variation, the larger the penalty. If two funds have the exact same return, the one with more variation in its return is given the larger risk penalty. Funds are ranked within their categories according to their risk-adjusted returns (after accounting for all sales charges and expenses). The 10% of funds in each category with the highest risk-adjusted return receive five stars, the next 22.5% receive four stars, the middle 35% receive three stars, the next 22.5% receive two stars, and the bottom 10% receive one star.

How multi-share-class funds work

For multi-share-class funds, each share class is rated separately and counted as a fraction of a fund within this scale, which may cause slight variations in the distribution percentages. This accounting prevents a single portfolio with multiple share classes in a smaller category from dominating any portion of the rating scale.

What are the rating periods?

Funds are rated for up to three periods—the trailing three, five, and 10 years—and ratings are recalculated each month. Funds with less than three years of performance history are not rated. For funds with only three years of performance history, their three-year star ratings will be the same as their overall Star Ratings. For funds with five-year records, their five-year histories will count for 60% of their overall rating and their three-year rating will count for 40% of the overall rating. For funds with more than a decade of performance, the overall rating will be weighted as 50% for the 10-year rating, 30% for the five-year rating, and 20% for the three-year rating.

If a fund changes Morningstar Categories during the evaluation period, its historical performance within the other category is given less weight in its Star Rating, based on the magnitude of the change. (For example, a change from a small-cap category to large-cap category is considered more significant than a change from mid-cap to large-cap.) Doing so ensures the fairest comparisons and minimizes any incentive for fund companies to change a fund’s style in an attempt to receive a better rating by shifting to another Morningstar Category.