Morningstar Advisor - December 2010/January 2011 - (Page 9)

Letter From the Editor We Regroup You’ll notice this issue that we switched things around a bit. Since we launched the magazine more than three years ago, we’ve added new features, dropped some others, and the structure of the magazine had become jumbled. When we began planning to add another new column, Know-How, which makes its debut this issue, we decided it was time to reorganize. We determined that readers were having a hard time finding a lot of our shorter features— such as Investments à la Carte, Talking Points, and In Practice—that were buried in the back of the magazine after much-longer sections. The articles contain a lot of good investment information and are written and designed in way that doesn’t require a lot of the reader’s time to digest. We decided to move all these features to the front of the magazine. Now, readers will see the shortbut-sweet content at the beginning before they get to the heavier, more-in-depth articles in Spotlight, Morningstar Conversation, Undiscovered Managers, and Gray Matters, our research section. The stock and fund screens and the data tables in By the Numbers remain in the same place, as does Don Phillips’ column, Phillips Curve. Our goal every issue is to provide you with clear and concise investing information that you can use in your practice. Making the magazine easy to navigate is part of that goal. Conciseness is the idea behind Know-How, our brand-new feature. In one page, we will tell you step by step how to do something that will make you a better investor. For the first Know-How, we turned to the folks at Footnoted.com, which Morningstar acquired in February. Michelle Leder and the Footnoted team have perfected the art of reading public filings and finding news—often buried in the footnotes—deep inside hundreds of pages of documents. We asked Footnoted staffer Sonya Hubbard how they do it, and we’re happy that she’s sharing the secrets of the trade in the first Know-How (Page 24). It’s been three years since we tackled retirement as a Spotlight issue, and a lot has changed in the meantime. The financial crisis and its aftermath have taken their toll on retirement portfolios, just as the first wave of baby boomers approach age 65. The outlook for the economy and markets is murky, as are health-care costs and Social Security. With the uncertainty, many retirees are straining to figure out how to get a reliable, and large enough, flow of income to fund their golden years. James X. Xiong and Thomas Idzorek think some form of annuities, in conjunction with traditional assets, could solve part of the problem. But determining what type of annuity and how much to buy is complicated, so the two Ibbotson Associates researchers have devised guidelines to help advisors find an appropriate allocation (“Creating Portfolios That Confront Retirement’s Risks,” Page 40). Christine Benz, Morningstar’s director of personal finance, then follows with model retirement portfolios made up of mutual funds and exchange-traded funds composed of traditional assets (“Building In-Retirement Portfolios to Last,” Page 45). In retirement, nothing is certain. But these strategies have the potential to let retirees rest easy. Correction Jerry Kerns In the October/November issue, we incorrectly listed the assets under management of Nick Giacoumakis, the subject of our Advisor Profile. His firm, New England Investment & Retirement Group, manages $500 million in assets. MorningstarAdvisor.com 9 http://www.Footnoted.com http://www.MorningstarAdvisor.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Morningstar Advisor - December 2010/January 2011

Morningstar Advisor - December 2010/january 2011
Contents
New on morningstaradvisor.com
Contributors
Letter From the Editor
What Strategies Do You Use to Help Retirees Hedge Against Longevity Risk?
Investment Briefs
Four Picks for the Present
Scaring the Swiss
Tech Is the Apple of Managers’ Eyes
How to Read an Sec Filing
A Strategy That Loves Performance Chasers
Things Fall Apart, Even in Industrials
A Future in Questions, Not Answers
Research Over Chocolates
Creating Portfolios That Confront Retirement’s Risks
Building in-Retirement Portfolios to Last
On the Lookout for Guaranteed Income Streams
What Fires Up Mairs & Power
All Aboard!
Aiming at Alternatives
Stuff Your Stocking with Out-of-Favor Bargains
Stable, High Yields (No Bonds Included)
Mutural Fund Analyst Picks
50 Most Popular ETFs
Undervalued Stocks with Wide Moats
Twelve Bee, Huh?

Morningstar Advisor - December 2010/January 2011