Upgrades

Barclays Global Investors announced that its iShares S&P California Municipal Bond and New York Municipal Bond funds, each a subset of the S&P National Municipal Bond Index, began trading on the American Stock Exchange. Barclays said the funds, the first state municipal bond ETFs available to U.S. investors, track liquid, institutional-quality municipal bond indexes; each has an annual expense ratio of 0.25%.

…Morningstar released new Stewardship Grades for more than 1,000 mutual funds. Morningstar’s analysis of stewardship, which the firm began in 2004, is designed to help investors research, identify, and compare fund managers and fund companies that do a good–or poor–job of aligning their interests with those of fund shareholders. The new grades, along with detailed analyst reports on the individual components of the scores, are available to premium members of Morningstar.com. Of the 1,000 funds graded under the new methodology, only two received perfect scores: Clipper Fund and Selected Funds’ Selected American Shares, class D. The individual fund scores are available at www.morningstar.com/goto/AllStewardshipGrades.