Morningstar Direct to provide additional hedge-fund reports and analysis. Advisors can now get hedge-fund data on Morningstar's Advisor Workstation and a new hedge-fund analysis feature exlusive to the Chicago-based investment-data company's website edition. These developments are meant to make hedge funds more transparent and help investors, advisors and institutional money managers better evaluate hedge-fund options.

"Despite their growth, there is a lack of information on hedge funds, making research difficult and oftentimes expensive," says Joe Mansueto, chairman and CEO of Morningstar. "We hope to bring more transparency to the hedge fund industry to help investors better evaluate and compare these investments."

Big market

Morningstar says hedge funds have about $1.5 billion in assets - as opposed to about $9.3 trillion in mutual funds and about $325 billion in exchange-traded funds at the end of May, according to data compiled by the Investment Company Institute.

Subscribers to Morningstar Direct, a Web-based institutional research platform, have had access to the complete hedge-fund database since 2005.

The latest edition of Morningstar Direct will include hedge-fund research reports written by Morningstar's new hedge fund analysts. Morningstar tracks about 3,000 hedge funds. The upgrade lets subscribers search through important data points like risk-return statistics, management backgrounds and fees.

Morningstar expects to release a new version of its Advisor Workstation Office Edition that includes hedge-fund data before July is out. -FWR

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