Investment Data

Question

I have a fourth year finance student working on an assignment where he is researching diversification in mutual funds. He is looking for the number of stocks included in any given fund and the weight of each stock in the fund.

As far as I can see, we do not have anything that will do this. We have Datastream, but it does not seem to include mutual fund data -- unless I am missing it. If I am, please let me know.

I have suggested globefund.com, Yahoo! Finance's Mutual Funds Center (http://finance.yahoo.com/funds), or www.morningstar.com, all of which include profiles that give some picture of fund diversification, but certainly not a complete picture. I believe that one could get a better picture if one paid for a deeper level of access.

If students here are being asked to do these types of assignments, it seems that we should be thinking about providing access to this type of data. So, my question is: If Datastream does not do this, is there a product that we can look at that does?

Answers

1. The mutual fund prospectus and the annual and semi-annual or quarterly reports will give this information, but that would necessitate going to each one individually, although at least, mutual fund companies tend to put multiple funds in one prospectus/report. You can get these filings from SEDAR (http://www.sedar.com/homepage_en.htm); direct link to mutual funds (http://www.sedar.com/issuers/issuers_en.htm - scroll down to Investment Fund Groups (Public Companies shows up first).

2. We use Bloomberg for this type of analysis but the difficulty with Bloomberg is that you can't download the data. They will not sell the professional service (i.e. the one that allows you to download) to academic libraries. Also the historical data is limited for many time series. It is first and foremost a brokers and investors tool.

3. I think that information can be derived from the data in the Fundata Canada Inc mutual funds database.
http://www.fundata.com