The changes come as the agency tries to reflect its revised approach to incorporating concentration risk in its rating analysis.
Over the next 90 days, Fitch will take rating actions on funds it has identified as being concentrated.
The agency said changes would be “fairly limited in scope”. The separate criteria reports for rating short-term and long-term bond funds have been merged and the agency has clarified the treatment of defaulted issuers in its rating analysis of bond fund portfolios.
Fitch has also updated the analytical framework for rating funds with different levels of concentration risk by introducing what it said was a more precise framework for large exposures to particular issuers or groups of issuers.
Fitch’s global bond fund rating criteria applies to various types of fixed-income funds, such as bond funds, short-term bond funds, fixed-income exchange-traded funds and certain managed pools of fixed-income assets.
The agency said bond fund ratings include two measures of risk; measuring vulnerability to losses as a result of credit defaults, and a portfolio’s potential sensitivity to market risk factors, such as duration, spread risk, currency fluctuations and others.
