Our Featured Database

This month our featured database is the Morningstar.com Library Edition. A fantastic source of information for your investing needs, with data on over 20,000 stocks and mutual funds, in-depth analyst reports, investment screeners, portfolio analysis tools, and investor education courses. Morningstar.com Library Edition is available for use at the library, or for Patchogue-Medford cardholders, from home, with their barcode and PIN numbers.

Access the Morningstar.com Library Edition directly or see listings of all of our databases.

What's In It?

Morningstar.com Library Edition contains the following features:

• Accurate, up-to-date, performance data on over 20,000 stocks and mutual funds, with updates every business day. Up to 10 years worth of historical financial statements, key ratios, and charts are also available.
• In-depth Morningstar analyst research reports on over 1,500 stocks and 2,000 mutual funds.
• Stock and mutual fund screening tools with 220 separate data points for funds and 470 for stocks.
• Portfolio X-Ray tool to see how two or more stocks or funds work together as part of an existing or hypothetical portfolio.
• Investor Classroom with tutorials on how to use the database, a glossary of investing terms, and 150 courses on investing for beginning and experienced investors.

Why Would I Want To Use It?

Morningstar.com Library Edition takes you through the entire investing process -- helping you learn the basics of investing, finding appropriate stocks and funds, evaluating them, and seeing how they work together in a portfolio.

• Beginning Investors can use the Investor Classroom to help teach themselves the basics of investing.
• More experienced investors can use the Portfolio X-Ray tool to help optimize their current or potential portfolios, or use the hundreds of data points available to screen stocks and funds.
• Covers all stocks traded on the New York Stock Exchange, American Stock Exchange, and NASDAQ, plus 14,000 mutual funds.
• In-depth Analyst Reports are the same as those in the print editions of Morningstar.
• Take advantage of Morningstar's proprietary investing tools, including star ratings, stock fair value estimates, investing style box, and more.

How to Use the Database?

If you know the name or ticker symbol of a stock or mutual fund you are interested in researching, simply enter it in the box provided and click "Go" to see current price, performance, and ratings data.

Use the tabs at the left side of the screen to explore more in-depth information and historical data on the security, including, for stocks -- valuation ratios, financial statements, key ratios, charts and returns, links to SEC filings, and ownership, and for mutual funds -- total returns, tax analysis, risk measures, portfolio, management, and fees and expenses.

Click on the Formatted Report link on the left side of the page to display an easily printable summary of the most important data on the security.

Click on the Reports tool

• Under Ticker, enter the name or ticker symbol of the stock or mutual fund you want to find.
• If you want to see a listing of all the funds from a single broker use the Name Starts With search. eg. Vanguard, Fidelity.
• If you want to find a stock or fund that contains a particular word, or if you are not sure of the exact name order, use the Name Contains search. Using this search you can find a list of funds that for example, contain the word Japan or aggressive.

Click on the Screener tool

Use this helpful tool if you're looking for an investment that meets certain criteria, such as a large cap growth fund with a Morningstar rating of 4 or better, or a stock with low debt in the utilities industry. Choose from 220 mutual fund data points and over 470 data points for stocks.

• Choose to screen either stocks or mutual funds.
• The "Morningstar Screens" button contains a number of pre-screened lists that you can browse.
• Choose an initial data point to screen from the drop down box. A separate box will open up allowing you to enter your preferred data. Morningstar will display any acceptable ranges for the data to insure a more accurate search. You can receive definitions of any of the data points in the Glossary located within the Help & Education tab.
• Morningstar will display the number of securities that meet your chosen criteria. If you are satisfied with your search, click on the "View Results" button.
• If you want to further narrow or refine your search, simply choose another data point.

Click on the Portfolio X-Ray tool

This tool allows you to get "under the hood" of your investments and see how they all fit together. You can check for overconcentration in a particular stock or industry sector, and break down your holdings by asset allocation, sector, fees and expenses, world region, and more.

• First choose whether you want to set up your portfolio based upon percentage holdings or the actual dollar amounts of your current or potential holdings.
• Then enter the individual security's ticker symbol and holding amounts. If you do not know the ticker symbol, use the "ticker lookup".
• Click "View Your Portfolio X-Ray." If you want to save a copy of the results, please print them out, as you cannot save a portfolio online.

Access the Investor Classroom

Click on the Help & Education link at the top of the page to access:

The Patron's Guide is a helpful 6-page printout with a summary of the major features of the database.

Training Seminars offer more in-depth instruction on how to make use of the screeners, stock and fund reports, and portfolio x-ray in the database.

Investing Classroom contains over 150 mini classes on stock and mutual fund investing. Classes are ranked from the 100s to the 500s, with the 100 series covering basic investing topics.

The Glossary contains definitions of investing terms used in the database.

This page was last updated on June 27, 2005.