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| | | | Adept. Inventive. Experienced. | |  | | | Our goal is to offer products that help improve the overall investment experience for anyone using our services—individual investors, financial advisors, and institutions. Since Morningstar was founded more than 25 years ago, we’ve continued to evolve and expand our products, and we remain committed to leading the industry in delivering world-class investment research and services to people around the globe. | |
Investor Focus
We design our products to provide the pertinent facts because investors use our information to help them make well-informed investment decisions. We also maintain an independent view. If we think an investment vehicle doesn’t meet the needs of investors, we won’t hesitate to express that opinion. We’ve advocated better disclosure practices for mutual funds and stocks; we’ve contributed Congressional testimony and numerous speeches and articles addressing corporate governance issues in the mutual fund industry.
Depth, Breadth, and Accuracy of Data
Morningstar employs 265 stock, fixed-income, and fund analysts worldwide. We maintain one of the largest, most comprehensive databases in the industry, with information on approximately 416,000 investment offerings of 10 types of investments. As of Dec. 31, 2012, we provided extensive data on 139,000 mutual fund share classes, 32,500 stocks, 9,200 separate accounts and collective investment trusts, 3,700 closed-end funds, 111,000 variable annuity/life subaccounts, 10,000 exchange-traded funds, 7,000 hedge funds, and 4,500 state-sponsored college savings plan portfolios. Our historical performance data on mutual funds goes back to 1976. In addition to raw performance statistics, we also cover portfolio holdings for the mutual funds and other managed investment products in our database. We have 86 years of capital markets data capturing performance of 18 market data indexes.
Innovative, Proprietary Investment Tools
We have developed a number of proprietary research and analytical tools that support our fundamental approach to investing. Examples include:
 Morningstar Rating™: popularized the concept of risk-adjusted
returns among the general investing public;
Morningstar Style Box™: classifies investment offerings based
on their underlying size and investment style;
Morningstar® Ownership Zone™: graphical tool that plots each
stock in a fund’s portfolio within the Morningstar Style Box;
Morningstar Analyst Rating™: Morningstar's forward-looking
analysis of a fund, expressed as a Gold, Silver, Bronze,
Neutral, or Negative rating.
We developed a proprietary sector classification system for stocks, a portfolio analysis tool, a set of proprietary market indexes based on the Morningstar Style Box, and a set of comprehensive asset allocation tools for the retirement planning market.
Research and Technology Expertise
Morningstar strives to rapidly adopt new technology that can improve the products we deliver to our clients. We have also built a flexible technology platform that allows our products to work together across a full range of investment databases, delivery formats, and market segments. We develop most of our own software and technology tools in-house, enabling us to leverage our expertise and tailor our products to the needs of our customers. | | |
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