Rating

Overview

The Rating element captures a publisher's qualitative assessment, recommendation, or opinion about a financial entity — typically a security, issuer, sector, industry, country, or region — together with metadata identifying the rating's source, timing, scope, and any associated change action. It is the central mechanism in RIXML for communicating analyst opinions (e.g. Buy/Hold/Sell), credit ratings, and other evaluative judgements. The required rating attribute carries the normalised value from RatingEnum, while the mandatory RatingEntity child identifies who issued the rating. A rich set of optional attributes — timeFrame, priorCurrent, relationship, volatile, volatilityRisk, ratingDateTime, ratingType, aspect, and ratingAction — supply context such as time horizon, prior versus current designation, volatility risk, the dimension being rated, and any change being signalled (sources: data-dictionary-2.5.1 p.65, data-dictionary-v3-draft p.69, release-notes-2.1 p.2). Conceptually, Rating expresses the analyst's *current* opinion at a point in time; the change to that opinion is conveyed via the ratingAction attribute (or, in v3 drafts, a RatingAction sibling) [RIXML Research Data Dictionary v2.5.1 p.19].

Usage

Rating is an optional child that can appear zero or more times within a wide range of parent elements, including Security, Issuer, SectorIndustry, Country, Region, Index, AssetClass, AssetType, and SecurityType (sources: release-notes-2.1 p.2, example-morningcall-advanced-2.4, data-dictionary-2.4 p.61). Each Rating instance MUST carry a rating attribute drawn from RatingEnum and MUST contain exactly one RatingEntity child identifying the rating source (sources: level-one-2.3 p.16, level-one-2.5 p.16, example-industry-advanced-2.4). When rating is PublisherDefined, implementations historically supplied a PublisherDefinedValue child to carry the publisher's native rating label (sources: level-one-2.2 p.21, level-one-2.3 p.15). Multiple Rating instances on the same parent are typical when conveying different rating perspectives — for example a fundamental rating from the publisher alongside a third-party credit rating, a short-term and a long-term rating, or distinct ratings for separate aspects of the same entity. To support cross-publisher search and aggregation, implementers SHOULD include a normalised RIXML RatingEnum value even when also conveying a publisher-defined value [RIXML Level One Addendum v2.3.1 p.15]. When tracking rating changes for individual securities or issuers, set ratingAction at the Rating level rather than on the parent element so that each rating's action can be tracked independently [RIXML Research Data Dictionary v2.5.1 p.65].

Rules

• MUSTRating MUST contain exactly one RatingEntity child element to identify who issued the rating.[RIXML Level One Addendum v2.3 p.16] [RIXML Level One Addendum v2.5 p.16] [Industry Report (Advanced) Sample v2.4]↗ [Company Report (Advanced) Sample v2.4]↗
• MUSTRating MUST carry a rating attribute whose value is drawn from RatingEnum.[RIXML Level One Addendum v2.3.1 p.15] [RIXML Research Data Dictionary v2.5.1 p.65] [RIXML Research Suite Data Dictionary v3.0 (DRAFT) p.69]↗
• SHOULDWhen rating is set to PublisherDefined, a PublisherDefinedValue child SHOULD be supplied to carry the publisher's native rating label.[RIXML Level One Addendum v2.2 p.21] [RIXML Level One Addendum v2.3 p.15]
• SHOULDImplementations SHOULD include a normalised RatingEnum value on Rating alongside any publisher-defined value to enable meaningful cross-publisher searching and aggregation.[RIXML Level One Addendum v2.3.1 p.15] [RIXML Level One Addendum v2.5 p.15]
• SHOULDConsumers SHOULD handle publisher-defined rating values gracefully and not treat their presence as a parse failure in Level One implementations.[RIXML Level One Addendum v2.5 p.16]
• INFORMATIVERating children of Issuer, AssetClass, AssetType, Country, and Region are not required by RIXML Level One; they MAY still appear in fully-compliant documents but are outside the Level One subset.[RIXML Level One Addendum v2.2 p.17] [RIXML Level One Addendum v2.3 p.12] [RIXML Level One Addendum v2.3.1 p.12] [RIXML Level One Addendum v2.5 p.12] [RIXML Level One Addendum v2.5 p.20]
• SHOULDWhen a parent element carries multiple Rating children, ratingAction SHOULD be set on the individual Rating rather than on the parent so that action tracking remains granular.[RIXML Research Data Dictionary v2.5.1 p.65]
• SHOULDResearch products whose Subject is Recommendations SHOULD establish or update the relevant Rating elements for the covered securities.[RIXML Research Data Dictionary v2.5.1 p.131]

Relationships

• requiresRatingEntity — Every Rating requires exactly one RatingEntity child to identify the source of the rating assessment.
• constrainsRatingEnum — The required rating attribute on Rating is constrained to values from RatingEnum, optionally extended via a PublisherDefinedValue child.
• qualifiesRatingActionEnum — The optional ratingAction attribute, drawn from RatingActionEnum, indicates how the rating has changed (e.g. upgrade, downgrade, initiation, reiteration).
• qualifiesRatingAspectEnum — The aspect attribute (added in v2.4) qualifies Rating by indicating which dimension of the rated entity is being evaluated — e.g. Investment, CreditRisk, MarketRisk, EarningsQuality, CompetitiveMoat.
• qualifiesRatingTypeEnum — The ratingType attribute distinguishes whether the value represents a statement of rating, a watch status, or an outlook perspective.
• qualifiesRatingRelationshipEnum — The relationship attribute provides a frame of reference for interpreting the rating (e.g. relative to a benchmark).
• qualifiesRatingVolatilityRiskEnum — The volatilityRisk attribute conveys the potential price fluctuation of the rated entity (not the volatility of the rating itself).
• qualifiesTermEnum — The timeFrame attribute, drawn from TermEnum, indicates whether the rating is short-term or long-term in nature.
• qualifiesPriorCurrentTypeEnum — The priorCurrent attribute distinguishes a current rating from a prior one, typically used when both are reported for comparison.
• contrasts-withRating.ratingAction — Rating expresses the author's current opinion, while the ratingAction attribute on Rating describes the change to that opinion (upgrade, downgrade, reiteration).
• qualifiesSecurity — Rating is most commonly used as an optional, repeatable child of Security to convey publisher and third-party ratings for that security.
• qualifiesIssuer — Rating may appear as a child of Issuer to convey issuer-level credit or investment ratings (outside the Level One subset).
• qualifiesSectorIndustry — Rating may appear within SectorIndustry to express analyst opinions on a sector or industry as a whole.
• qualifiesCountry — Rating may appear within Country in the full schema, though Level One does not include this nesting.
• qualifiesRegion — Rating may appear within Region in the full schema; Level One excludes this nesting.
• replacesRecommendation — Rating was renamed from the v2.0 Recommendation element in v2.1 to align with industry terminology, and now also carries relationship and volatility-risk context.