The story
Founded by Joe Mansueto in 1984.1
Founder Joe Mansueto initially had the idea for Morningstar in 1982 while reviewing mutual fund annual reports he had requested from several prominent fund managers. However, it was only after a year working as a stock analyst for Harris Associates, seeing the fund industry and potential competitors up close, that he was convinced that the opportunity was there. Morningstar was subsequently founded in 1984 from his one-bedroom Chicago apartment with an initial investment of US$80,000. The name Morningstar is taken from the last sentence in Walden, a book by Henry David Thoreau; "the sun is but a morning star".
In July 1999, Morningstar accepted an investment of US$91 million from SoftBank in return for a 20 percent stake in the company. The two companies had formed a joint venture in Japan the previous year.
Morningstar's initial public offering occurred on May 3, 2005, with 7,612,500 shares at $18.50 each. Morningstar went public by following in Google's footsteps and using the OpenIPO method, rather than the traditional method. This allowed individual investors to bid on the price of the stock via equal access.
In 2006, Morningstar acquired Ibbotson Associates, Inc., an investment research firm. In 2007, Morningstar acquired the mutual fund data business of S&P Global.
In 2010, Morningstar acquired credit rating agency Realpoint for $52 million and began offering structured credit ratings and research to institutional investors. In the same year, Morningstar acquired Old Broad Street Research Ltd. (OBSR), a UK-based provider of fund research, ratings and investment advisory services, for $18.3 million. After the acquisition, the company was renamed as Morningstar OBSR.
In 2014, Morningstar acquired ByAllAccounts, Inc., a provider of data aggregation technology for financial applications.
In 2016, Morningstar acquired remaining ownership of PitchBook Data for approximately $225 million. In September 2016, Morningstar announced that it had appointed Kunal Kapoor as chief executive officer, effective January 2017, with Mansueto becoming executive chairman at the same time.
In 2019, Morningstar acquired the world's fourth largest credit rating agency DBRS for $669 million. After the acquisition, DBRS merged with Morningstar’s credit rating business to form the Morningstar DBRS.
Read the full text
In 2020, Morningstar entered into an agreement to acquire Sustainalytics, a research and ratings firm specializing in environmental, social, and governance (ESG) insights. That same year, Morningstar agreed to acquire PlanPlus Global, a Canada-based financial planning and risk assessment software company.
In 2021, Morningstar announced it would acquire the UK and international (including Jersey, Hong Kong and Dubai) operations of the Australian wealth management platform Praemium (ASX: PPS) for £35 million. Later that year, Morningstar announced the acquisition of Moorgate Benchmarks, in an effort to grow its index services under Morningstar Indexes.
In 2022, Morningstar announced that it will acquire the S&P Global-owned Leveraged Commentary & Data (LCD), a company specializing in leveraged loan market data, for about $650 million.
From Wikipedia’s article on Morningstar, Inc., shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.7