Fundata announces the 2020 FundGrade A+® Award winners

TORONTO, ON, January 22, 2021 – Fundata Canada Inc. is pleased to announce the winners of the Fundata FundGrade A+ Award for 2020. Awards were presented to 51 companies representing a total of 347 Canadian investment funds. This year, the A+ Awards were presented virtually. The Awards presentation is posted online at http://www.fundgradeawards.com/.

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

“We at Fundata want to acknowledge and honour the very real achievement of those funds – and their managers – that have excelled in 2020 and that have proven their value as outstanding stewards of their investors’ assets,” said Janny Vincent, President and CEO of Fundata Canada Inc.

Receiving the A+ Award for 2020 were 185 mutual funds, 55 exchange-traded funds (ETFs), 104 segregated funds, and 3 Responsible Investing funds.

“The A+ Award-winning funds and managers receiving the 2020 awards once again join a very elite group. The 347 winning funds represent only about 6 percent of the eligible mutual funds and 7 percent of eligible ETFs tracked by Fundata,” said Ms. Vincent.

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.

Canadian mutual funds have about $1.75 trillion combined in assets under management, as fund sponsors added 209 distinct new funds in 2020. With some 3,500 distinct mutual funds from over 300 suppliers, mutual fund investors can choose from over 40,000 fund variations in series and clones to suit every investment need.

The ETF universe also continued to attract new investment, reaching a new high of $249.7 billion in assets under management as 2020 drew to a close. In addition, fund sponsors added 112 distinct new ETFs in 2020. Investors can now choose from 846 ETFs in the Canadian marketplace as Canada’s ETF providers continue to innovate, providing diversified access to broad market indices as well as to new sectors, including cannabis and blockchain technology.

“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. Since 2012, the A+ Awards have been accepted as an industry standard to fill that need. “Congratulations to all the FundGrade A+ Award winners on a job well done,” she added.

For more information and a complete list of the funds receiving the Fundata FundGrade A+ Rating for the calendar year 2020, 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 40,000 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.