Morningstar withdraws portfolio manager and X-ray

coyrls

Linton said:

I am interested to see that people are focussing on the portfolio tracking feature which I think is also provided by Trustnet. However it is the analysis of portfolios provided by X-ray which is most important to me. Why do people not want to see, for example, how much of their overall portfolio is in US and the mega techs?

Trustnet does give some data, Howver it is severely limited by not having standard categories. For example if you look at the country assignments you may find a significant % allocated to “international”.

Some platforms do provided access to X-ray for the portfolio held on that platform but I assume that will disappear in June.

I gave up using the Portfolio feature of Trustnet because it's coverage is more limited than Morning Star.  Several of my holdings couldn't be added to Trustnet's portfolio, I can't remember which now as it's a long time since I gave up using Trustnet.

SnowMan

Email received this morning about the timing of the morningstar portfolio manager changes

Dear valued customer, 
As we continue with the retirement of our Portfolio Manager tool, we want to share key information and dates to keep this transition as smooth as possible.  

We will begin retiring Portfolio Manager across all global media sites on 27 June 2025. You will no longer be able to edit portfolios made using Portfolio Manager once retirement is complete.

Our new global site experience will be available starting 27 June 2025. Read-only versions of portfolios made using Portfolio Manager will also be available during this time. To view them, sign in using the same email and password associated with your current Premium or free membership and visit the My Account section. The ability to download your portfolio holdings and transaction data will be available early August 2025. We will notify you when this feature is available.

As a reminder, any watchlists associated with your current Premium or free membership will be automatically migrated to the new site experience. 

While you can still use Portfolio Manager until 27 June, we encourage you to export any data from your portfolios before that date. 
We’ll continue to keep you updated as we make these changes. 
-The Morningstar team 

EthicsGradient

Has anyone worked out if their X-Ray tool will still be available on platforms like ii and AJBell?

dunstonh

EthicsGradient said:

Has anyone worked out if their X-Ray tool will still be available on platforms like ii and AJBell?

Its probably why they are withdrawing the free version.  

Platforms pay FE or Morningstar to get their API data.   If the same data is made available to consumers at no charge, then it devalues the offering.    FE already has the free offering handicapped and most platforms still use FE for the data reporting.

ChilliBob

dunstonh said:

EthicsGradient said:

Has anyone worked out if their X-Ray tool will still be available on platforms like ii and AJBell?

Its probably why they are withdrawing the free version.  

Platforms pay FE or Morningstar to get their API data.   If the same data is made available to consumers at no charge, then it devalues the offering.    FE already has the free offering handicapped and most platforms still use FE for the data reporting.

That's interesting, and hopefully where it's going, it's a useful feature on II for sure. You could do it manually, for sure, in Excel, but it would be rather tedious to update. I guess if depends on how many holdings you have, and how accurate you want/need it to be. 

Linton

I have implemented an Xray-like tool as a LibreOffice spreadsheet. It uses a spreadsheet list of investments and their values spread over multiple accounts generated by MsMoney and hand entered  data from the Portfolio data on each investment from Morningstar to produce reports showing underlying company sizes, Value/Growth, Defensive/cyclic values and sector allocations for each geographical area.

Showing the data in this form is more useful to me than the overall portfolio allocations given by X-ray currently.

Updating is not an excessive chore since the Portfolio data from Morningstar only changes once a month and usually by a small %.

I don’t think the X-ray data from ii and AJBell is that useful since you can only analyse your current portfolio held on those platforms. But surely a major use of X-ray would be to investigate possible changes. Also portfolios may well be spread over multiple accounts.

EthicsGradient

Linton said:

I have implemented an Xray-like tool as a LibreOffice spreadsheet. It uses a spreadsheet list of investments and their values spread over multiple accounts generated by MsMoney and hand entered  data from the Portfolio data on each investment from Morningstar to produce reports showing underlying company sizes, Value/Growth, Defensive/cyclic values and sector allocations for each geographical area.

Showing the data in this form is more useful to me than the overall portfolio allocations given by X-ray currently.

Updating is not an excessive chore since the Portfolio data from Morningstar only changes once a month and usually by a small %.

I don’t think the X-ray data from ii and AJBell is that useful since you can only analyse your current portfolio held on those platforms. But surely a major use of X-ray would be to investigate possible changes. Also portfolios may well be spread over multiple accounts.

On ii (I can't remember about AJBell, and no longer have an account there), you can get the Morningstar X-ray for any OEIC or ETF that they offer (sadly, not ITs) when you bring up info about them (typically from the search box at the bottom of the screen), not just ones you already own. This of course may disappear at the end of the month, since we don't know for sure.

SnowMan

Morningstar have also put this update on their website (via a link when you access portfolio manger) which contains more detail than the email

https://www.morningstar.co.uk/uk/news/263615/upcoming-changes-to-our-membership-offerings-tools-and-features-.aspx

prowla

There are companies working on presenting that data.

jaybeetoo

Don’t bother with the Hargreaves Lansdown X-ray analysis - it’s useless.  For example, if you have a global investment trust it categorises it as a UK share - it doesn’t analyse inside the investment trust.