Investment Company Rankings
Member firms may not use a ranking of investment companies in any retail communication unless it was created and published by a ranking entity or based on a ranking entity’s performance measurements. A ranking entity is any company (such as Moody’s or Standard & Poor’s) that provides independent general information about investment companies to the public and whose services are not procured by the investment company to assign a ranking.
All retail communications containing an investment company ranking must disclose prominently:
• name of the category (e.g., growth)
• number of investment companies in the category
• name of the ranking entity
• length of the ranking period and its ending date
• criteria (such as yield or total return) on which the ranking is based
Such communications must also disclose the fact that past p