TORONTO, ON, January 26, 2018 – Fundata Canada Inc. is pleased to announce the winners of the Fundata FundGrade A+ Award for 2017. Awards were presented to 57 companies representing a total of 274 Canadian investment funds at Fundata’s annual “Evening of Excellence” held on Thursday, January 25, 2018, at The Globe and Mail Centre in Toronto.

The FundGrade A+ Award is given annually to investment funds and managers who have shown consistent, outstanding, risk-adjusted performance throughout the year. The FundGrade A+ Award provides investors, advisors, and fund managers with a single, reliable, easy-to-understand fund-performance rating based on up to 10 years of history.

Receiving the A+ Award for 2017 were 170 mutual funds, 38 exchange-traded funds (ETFs), 63 segregated funds, and 3 Responsible Investing funds. “The FundGrade A+ Rating is a totally objective, transparent, score-based annual fund performance calculation,” said Janny Vincent, President and CEO of Fundata Canada Inc. Ms. Vincent added that Award winners join an elite, highly prestigious group. “Tonight’s 274 winning funds represent only about 6.5 percent of the eligible mutual funds, segregated funds, and ETFs tracked by Fundata,” she said.

The FundGrade A+ Rating uses a score-based calculation to arrive at a grade-point average that ranks investment funds to determine the annual “best-of-the-best” ratings. The top-performing funds with a responsible investing mandate were honoured separately, with a winner from each of the Equity, Balanced, and Fixed Income categories.

The investment fund industry is a crucial component of Canadians’ net worth. With $1.48 trillion in assets under management in 2017, the mutual fund industry accounts for more than a third of Canadians’ financial wealth. And the ETF industry continues to grow, reaching a new high of $147 billion in assets under management in 2017.

“With such a large and diverse product universe, and with such an immense amount of investors’ capital under management, the need for absolutely reliable performance data and truly objective ratings has never been greater,” said Ms. Vincent. “We take pride in the fact that the FundGrade A+ Award has been embraced by our industry as a truly independent and objective benchmark, and an acknowledgement of superior fund performance,” she added.

For more information and a complete list of the funds receiving the Fundata FundGrade A+ Rating for the calendar year 2017, please visit www.fundgradeawards.com .

About Fundata Canada Inc.

Fundata Canada Inc. has been providing data aggregation and dissemination services to the Canadian media and financial marketplace since 1987. Fundata is a major provider in the distribution of fund and stock information in Canada. Our database contains data on over 39,000 investment fund products. Fundata provides customized data feeds, top-shelf analytics, cutting-edge software tools, and seamless hosted web solutions for fund companies, back office systems, investment planners, banks, trust companies, resellers and redistributors, and online, print, and broadcast media channels.

About the Fundata FundGrade A+ Rating

The FundGrade A+ Rating identifies funds that have been consistent FundGrade A-Grade performers over the past calendar year. It’s the only objective rating system available in the market that’s based solely on risk-adjusted performance history and that takes into account the consistency with which a fund is ranked at the top of its CIFSC class.