First Trust's Eurozone AlphaDEX UCITS ETF (FEUZ) has been awarded a five-star rating from Morningstar, First Trust announced in a press release this week. The award came shortly after the fund achieved €100m assets under management.
FEUZ tracks the NASDAQ AlphaDEX Eurozone Index, which picks European companies that that are judged as likely to produce alpha. Companies are picked from five sectors with a 10-20% weighting in each.
FEUZ has returned 31% over the last 12 months. This compares favourably to the Euro Stoxx 50 Index, the plainest vanilla among the European indexes, which has returned 25% over the same time period. It has an annual total expense ratio of 0.65%.
Derek Fulton, CEO at First Trust Global Portfolios said: "The fund uses a combination of Value and Momentum, is agnostic when it comes to market cap size and is ranked in the top decile of its Morningstar category over the past three years. We believe this demonstrates the true flexibility of the ETF structure to deliver Alpha for investors."
The award comes at a time when Morningstar's rating system has come under fire, especially from the Wall St Journal.
In a recent series of pieces titled 'The Morningstar Mirage', and 'Some Fund Ads Misrepresent Morningstar Ratings', the Journal criticized the predictive power of the ratings system and how they're portrayed.
