From Morningstar's write-up. Dated 25th July, '22.
What does this even SAY? It's not proper English. Written by a bot?
"...Morningstar's style-agnostic evaluation of this fund's process seeks to understand whether the strategy has a performance objective and sensible, clearly defined, repeatable execution. T. Rowe Price New Era Fund earns an Above Average Process Pillar rating.
This strategy hews closely to the market-cap and investment style of its Natural Resources category peers. Analyzing additional factors, this strategy holds highly liquid stocks. More-liquid assets are easier to buy and sell without adversely moving their prices and tend provide some ballast during market sell-offs. They also are easier to sell to meet redemptions if a host of investors decide to leave the fund in a short period of time. However, compared with Morningstar Category peers historically, the strategy is less exposed. (***Exposed to WHAT?) This strategy also has an overweight bias to the volatility factor, meaning investing in stocks that have a higher historical standard deviation of returns. This contributes to a high-risk, high-reward approach. But when compared with category peers, the strategy historically has had less exposure. Additionally, the managers have tended to overweight yield, shown by the portfolio's high exposure to stocks paying dividends or buying back shares. Such stocks can provide dependable income payments but also have their risks. Dividend-payers might cut payouts if their earnings fall. And the portfolio has more exposure than its Morningstar Category peers. (***Exposure to div. payers?) More information on a fund and its respective category's factor exposure can be found in the Factor Profile module within the Portfolio section.
In terms of portfolio turnover, this fund trades less frequently than the category’s average, potentially limiting costs to investors.
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Yes, it had to be a bot, or else maybe a 7th grader.... Jayzuz.
Comments
BTW, some short news articles now are also auto-generated and almost read like gobbledygook.
@Crash asked “What does this refer to?”
Poorly composed for sure. Best guess is they’re referring to the tendency of investors to “bolt” in mass and flee when a fund begins underperforming (which they alluded to in the preceding sentence). Apparently, PRNEX’s investor base is more loyal to the fund than the average for its category across industry.
Sounds like somebody with “just enough” knowledge of this fund (perhaps scanning some documents laid before them) sat at a computer and responded to a dozen or more pre-generated questions tossed at them requiring some type of numerical rating or affirmative / negative response. Liken it to those satisfaction surveys your mutual fund sends out after you’ve interacted with one of their live reps.
These questions often begin like this ….
- “On a scale of 1-10 rate the following …”
- Which of the following best describes …”
It saves an immeasurable amount of work if the one person in the organization most knowledgeable about mutual funds (or a committee) prepares all the questions and writes possible responses in advance. Why duplicate that process for every single fund? An underling can than throw the whole nearly incoherent body of the review together in minutes by sitting at a keyboard and selecting (clicking on) the “right” responses. Perhaps the best description - Computer generated with minimal human assistance.
PS - I hope no one is paying for this type of garbage.