8 Funds Get New Morningstar Ratings

Morningstar (MORN) said Monday that it changed the ratings on 8 funds in October – including some funds sold by Vanguard and PIMCO.

According to the fund research group, its research analysts upgraded one U.S. fund and downgraded seven funds last month. Also, analysts affirmed ratings for 55 funds and six target-date series and assigned three new fund ratings.

The Morningstar Analyst Rating for funds represents analysts' conviction in the fund's ability to outperform on a risk-adjusted basis over the long term.

Its five-tiered, qualitative Morningstar Analyst Rating scale has three positive levels or Morningstar Medalists — gold, silver and bronze — in addition to neutral and negative ratings.

As of Oct. 31, 132 U.S. funds have a gold rating, 274 funds had a silver rating and 352 funds had a bronze rating. There are 271 funds with a neutral rating and 31 with a negative rating.

Morningstar Medalists currently represent about 10% of mutual funds available for sale in the United States and 58% of assets under management. The analysts rate about $8 trillion of U.S. investor assets, or roughly 70% of total investor assets in the United States.

Worldwide, the Chicago-based research firm has 110 manager research analysts covering some 4,000 funds. The company provides data on roughly 195,000 open-end mutual funds, 9,600 closed-end funds and 12,200 exchange-traded product listings.

Here are the latest Morningstar analyst rating changes:

Morningstar Upgrades (from October 2015)