noting that Don and his team spent considerable time on the acquisition and its integration. It’s an important transaction for us and gives us a strong position in fund ratings and research for the UK market. 

Another focus was the expansion of our ETF coverage. Scott Burns leads this effort for us and has great insights on the market. We’ve quadrupled our ETF analyst staff over the past year to 16 globally. Our analyst staff helped launch ETF centers on our European websites and hosted our first ETF conference in the United States. 

We also restarted our closed-end fund research with the launch of the Closed-End Fund Weekly on Morningstar.com. Longtime followers of Morningstar will remember that we used to publish research on closed-end funds. With the closed-end market fairly quiet over the last decade, we pulled back analyst coverage but maintained data coverage. Now the growth of ETFs means there’s more interest in exchange- traded managed products. So we’re once again devoting analyst coverage to closed-end funds. That’s an exciting initiative, as there are many untold stories in the closed-end world that can present compelling investment opportunities. 

We also significantly improved our coverage of 529 college savings plans. Previously, we produced an annual list of the five best and five worst 529 plans, but there were many state plans we didn’t cover. In 2010 we produced ratings and comprehensive reports on 53 of the largest plans. For the first time, we’re providing ratings on each plan as well as the underlying investment options. 

Cathy Odelbo heads our equity and credit research teams. Cathy has done an extraordinary job building our equity research capabilities over the years and, more recently, building on those abilities to launch research on corporate credit issuers. We increased our corporate credit ratings from 100 to more than 720 in 2010 

