The LSE Directory / Fundamental data
Morningstar, Inc. is a Chicago-based financial services company that produces independent investment research, data and analytics covering mutual funds, ETFs, equities, fixed income and private markets. Its flagship outputs include the Morningstar Star Rating, a 1-to-5 star system that grades funds on risk-adjusted 3-, 5- and 10-year returns against category peers, and the institutional Morningstar Direct platform, which delivers portfolio, fund and equity data to asset managers and advisers. A separate Morningstar Research Portal, launched in 2022, serves financial advisers directly. The company organizes its business into five reportable segments: Morningstar Data and Analytics, PitchBook, Morningstar Wealth, Morningstar Credit and Morningstar Retirement. PitchBook, acquired in 2016 for roughly 225 million dollars, supplies data, research and AI-enabled software on private capital markets. Morningstar Credit is built around DBRS Morningstar, formed after the 2019 acquisition of the DBRS credit rating agency and registered as a Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organization. Morningstar Wealth offers model portfolios, separately managed accounts and an adviser platform, plus the retail Morningstar Investor product, while Morningstar Retirement provides investment advisory and risk-mitigation services to employers, advisers and individual savers. Unlike sell-side research shops, Morningstar positions itself as an independent analyst-driven researcher with no investment-banking arm, serving both retail investors and institutional clients from the same data backbone. Joe Mansueto founded the company in 1984 in his Chicago apartment with an initial 80,000 dollars in capital; the name is drawn from a line in Thoreau's Walden, "the sun is but a morning star." Morningstar went public on Nasdaq under ticker MORN on May 3, 2005, at 18.50 dollars a share via the OpenIPO auction method. As of fiscal year 2024 the company reported revenue of 2.28 billion dollars and net income of 369.9 million dollars, employed roughly 11,000 people, and operated in 29 countries with regional hubs in New York, London, Paris, Sydney, Hong Kong, Toronto and Mumbai. Other notable acquisitions include Ibbotson Associates (2006) and the ESG ratings firm Sustainalytics (2020). In 2026 Morningstar completed a 365 million dollar acquisition of the Center for Research in Security Prices (CRSP) from the University of Chicago, closing on February 2 after a September 2025 agreement; the deal folded CRSP's US-equity index benchmarks, underlying more than 3 trillion dollars in assets, into the Morningstar Indexes family and included an extended agreement with Vanguard to keep using the indexes for funds such as the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund. For the first quarter of 2026 the company reported total revenue of 644.8 million dollars, up 10.8 percent year over year, with Morningstar Credit revenue growing 38.4 percent and PitchBook contributing 172.4 million dollars.
