Eoin Treacy's view

 David and I spend a great deal of time identifying investment and trading opportunities we believe will be of interest to the Collective of subscribers.  Identifying investment vehicles that allow us to action these ideas is sometimes challenging not least in some of the more esoteric locales. In order to facilitate our theme of Empowerment Through Knowledge we began to add equities, funds, investment trusts, open and closed ended funds, ETFs, REITs and bonds to the Chart Library almost a decade ago. 

The database now contains almost 2000 funds almost all of which have been requested by subscribers at one time or another. We had previously listed the funds by geographic focus and loosely by domicile within the menus and subscribers could also find funds by using the Chart Library’s keyword search. However as the number of funds increased (some of the sections had more than 400 instruments) we needed to find a better way to categorise investment vehicles. 

Sarah Barnes and I embarked on this project last month and engaged with our programming team to automate the re-categorisation project. While there will inevitably be some minor changes to categories, more than 90% of the project is complete.  

You will notice that the main dropdown menu for the Chart Library is now considerably shorter which has eliminated the need to scroll. 

All of the funds can now be found in the Funds section. Within that section every fund in the system is listed on the front page and the primary subcategories can be found in the upper left. These are: 

Funds by Domicile
Funds by Currency
Funds by Geographic Focus
Funds by Type
Funds by Objective
Funds by Theme

Funds by Domicile – For one reason or another you may only be interested in investing in funds in your home market. Funds by domicile contains additional subcategories for each of the countries where funds in the database are listed. For example you will find all of the ffunds in the Librart that are listed in the UK here. 

Funds by Currency – Investors often wish to monitor their currency exposure by buying funds denominated in their base currency. For example a Euro denominated investor may be interested in the globe but only wish to invest in Euro denominated funds. All of the Euro denominated funds would be found in this category. 

Funds by Geographic Focus – This is perhaps one of the more interesting subcategories, because subscribers are often interested in finding the best fund to reflect investment potential in a specific country or region. This is a diverse category because it covers the globe but to take a specific example you can now scroll through all of the China or India related funds in the Library with relative ease and without going through an exhaustive search. 

Funds by Type – Some investors like the expediency of ETFs while others like to seek bargains among investment trusts and closed-ended funds. Others will have open ended funds and unit trusts in their pension accounts. Funds by type allows you to click through lists of funds segregated by type. For example here is a list to all of the investment trusts and closed-end funds in our database.

Funds by Objective – Fund companies often attempt to differentiate themselves by defining a category where there is not much competition or when they see a gap where they might capture demand for a new product. The result is that there are a very wide number of fund objectives, but for example here is a link to the precious metals section. 

Funds by Theme – At The Chart Seminar we have long taught that commonality across sectors and then across regions often gives us clues to the stories inspiring investor interest. Healthcare is one such theme where technology, availability and growth trajectories, particularly in high population regions, are combining to inspire optimism. Here is a link to the healthcare theme’s section:

We used a spreadsheet derived from Bloomberg data to categorise the chart Library’s Funds en masse. We’ll spend some time this week doing some consolidation and correcting any errors that may have occurred and would welcome feedback from subscribers. Our next step is re-categorise the fixed income and monetary measures sections to make them more user friendly. 

While I believe this was a valuable exercise in its own right, the true utility of this re-categorisation will become clear when we launch the upgraded version of the filter system.  We expect to have positive news on this front early next week.