The LSE Directory / Index providers
Morningstar Indexes is the index calculation and benchmark design division of Morningstar, Inc., the Chicago based investment research firm listed on Nasdaq as MORN. It builds, maintains and licenses more than 25,000 indexes across equities, fixed income, multi asset allocation, sustainability and thematic strategies, with more than 4.2 trillion dollars in assets under management or benchmarked to its indexes. Its product range spans broad market cap benchmarks, proprietary factor and strategy indexes such as the Wide Moat Focus Index, and Morningstar style box based classification indexes, plus custom index design, calculation and administration services for asset managers building index linked funds and ETFs. Where legacy providers such as S&P Dow Jones, MSCI and FTSE Russell weight indexes mainly by market capitalization and rules based screens, Morningstar layers its own equity research into construction. The Wide Moat Focus Index selects stocks that Morningstar's equity analysts rate as having a wide economic moat, a competitive advantage judged likely to last more than 20 years, and that trade furthest below the firm's analyst estimated fair value; its style box indexes classify companies on a size by value/growth grid drawn from the same framework used across Morningstar's fund and stock research. The firm positions itself explicitly as a lower cost, more flexible alternative to entrenched incumbents, and since its 2026 acquisition of CRSP it has been extending into combined public and private market indexing, including work with its PitchBook subsidiary on indexes that blend listed and private company data. Morningstar completed its acquisition of the Center for Research in Security Prices, an index and data provider housed at the University of Chicago, on February 2, 2026, after announcing the deal on September 23, 2025. On April 29, 2026 it rebranded the CRSP Market Indexes as Morningstar Indexes; those benchmarks underpin more than 3 trillion dollars in linked assets, including Vanguard's Total Stock Market and Mid Cap Index funds (VTI/VTSAX and VO/VIMAX), and Vanguard announced the affected fund names would add "Morningstar" in July 2026 without any change to fund objectives or management. On June 10, 2026, CME Group and Morningstar announced a multi year exclusive licensing agreement for CME to launch the first derivatives on the Morningstar US Total Market, Large Cap, Large Cap Value, Large Cap Growth, Mid Cap and Small Cap indexes. Amelia Furr is president of Morningstar Indexes; Kunal Kapoor is chief executive of parent Morningstar, Inc. As of this profile's writing, the CRSP integration is still mid rollout: the Morningstar branding on the former CRSP indexes and on the Vanguard fund names is scheduled to fully take effect only in late July 2026, and CRSP's academic Research Data Products content finished migrating from crsp.org to Morningstar's own site on June 30, 2026 as the CRSP brand winds down outside its historical academic dataset business.
