Research tools FAQ

We cover all AIC member investment companies, who may be an investment trust, offshore investment company, Venture Capital Trust or UK Fund REIT, regardless of the stock exchange they are listed on. We also cover those companies who are non-members of the AIC provided they are listed on the London Stock Exchange, either on the Premium or Specialist Fund Segments.

There are three main ways of selecting investment companies using the tools that are freely available on our site.

• Compare Companies is the most popular and offers users the ability to quickly filter and sort, on AIC sector or high-level data points such as discount and yield, at a click of a button.
   
• Advanced Compare expands this offering, allowing users to more freely configure their company lists and add additional data points or look back historically.
   
• Investment Company Screener allows you to filter the universe of investment companies on around 20 characteristics, then view, sort and chart data. Use the scales icon to display investment companies and their portfolios side-by-side.

Along with tools to aid with selection, we also offer a range of way investors can monitor companies too. Most of these will require an AIC account to use to ensure your saved settings remain when you return, along with adding additional functionality.

• Income Finder enables you to keep track of when your investment companies are paying dividends, and create your own virtual income portfolio.
   
• 'My portfolios' allow users to create their own list of investment companies and save it for use in the future. You can create as many as you like and label them accordingly as well as selecting many additional data points to view. Access our Income Finder and Dividend diary features for each, as well as a new 'portfolio analysis' view (Please note, this application was previously known as Watchlists)
   
• My alerts can be set up so users can receive a customised daily email alert based on movements to a number of metrics such as share prices or discounts. Notifications can also be created for new company literature or stock exchange announcements.  Please note: The maximum number of emails you would receive is on per day.  All triggered alerts would be found within the same email. 

No. Website users do not need to create an account or sign in to access our range of free tools.  It is only necessary to create an account if you wish to use features within the tools that require the system to remember your settings.  For example if you wish to create your own personalised portfolio or receive an email alert on market price changes. 

Most of our data is provided to us from Morningstar in the form of a daily feed which includes NAVs, discounts, performance metrics and other portfolio and operational data.

Stock exchange announcements are populated from RNS and PRN newswires with a delay of up to 1 hour. 

Company literature in the form of factsheets, semi-annual and annual reports are from FEFundInfo.

ESG policies are provided directly from member companies.

Morningstar’s daily feed is uploaded into our site at 8.15am each business day. This data accounts for market movements including share price and discount changes from the market close of the last business day. 

Information on our website is updated daily and the NAVs provided to us by Morningstar are the estimated values of each company. Even equity investment companies who value their assets daily do so with a one day lag.  The Net Asset Values you see on the site will therefore be estimated to enable a fairer comparison with the previous market close share price and in turn produce a more accurate discount estimate. 

Morningstar do not attempt to estimate NAVs for alternative asset investment companies.

Due to licensing restrictions from our data provider, we are unable to distribute data in excel format. However, there are several data files you are able to access that the AIC themselves own.

• Industry overview - Provides a snapshot of Industry assets and a small number of operational data items at each month end. The file is summarised by individual investment company or VCT, by AIC sector and by asset management group.
   
• AIC corporate activity - All corporate actions going back over 15 years.  These include block-listings, IPOs, new issues, allotments, tenders, listing changes, roll-overs etc.
   
• Monthly Information Report (MIR) - Please be aware that these are complex looking files mainly for professionals to database company data. MIR contains asset sizes, all NAV types, gearing, current period revenue, reserves, shares/treasury shares, cash and unlisted holdings, gearing ranges, geographic exposure and others.

Due to licensing restrictions, we are not able show performance data for FTSE or MSCI indices. Instead, we show Morningstar indices which are highly correlated with similar regional and size weighted indices. For example, for Scottish Mortgage we show the "Morningstar Developed Markets" index which is highly correlated with the more well-known global equity indices. You can see the performance data for these comparative indices in each separate performance table as well as the fund manager benchmark (at the top of the page) for your reference.

Historic performance can be found on a by company basis on each company’s performance tab on their profile page.  This information has both NAV and share price return performance over 1, 3, 5 and 10 years as well as the last five discrete years.  Below these figures is also a powerful charting tool that track the performance over time and is highly configurable with the ability to add the performance of the company’s peer group or a comparative index for additional context.

Fixed month end performance is also available on ‘Advanced Compare’. Past months can be selected via the drop down under the ‘specify date' tab (shown below) and monthly pdf reports can be found on our archive page here.

A full list of ZDPs can be found here. Users can push the different buttons at the top of the screen to access hurdles, yields and terminal asset values (TAVs).