Skip to Content

Picks from Morningstar's Senior Researchers

Morningstar's Russ Kinnel, Ben Johnson, and Elizabeth Collins discuss their favorite investment ideas among mutual funds, ETFs, and stocks.

Christine Benz Apr 14, 2016

Morningstar.com held its annual Individual Investor Conference on April 2. The agenda featured discussions of a variety of key topics for investors: the direction of the economy, planning for a successful retirement, and cutting the tax bill on your portfolio. We'll be replaying these sessions on Morningstar.com this week, so stay tuned.

The conference also featured a whole session's worth of investment ideas--stock, fund, and exchange-traded fund picks from some of Morningstar's top researchers. Here's a compendium of the ideas that Russ Kinnel, director of manager research; Ben Johnson, director of global ETF research; and Elizabeth Collins, director of equity research for North America, shared during the conference session.

Best Ideas For Dividend-Seekers

Best Ideas For Bargain-Hunters

Best Ideas for Core Equity Exposure

Best Ideas for Bond Investors

Best Ideas for Growth Investors

More in Stocks

March PCE Inflation Index Forecasts Show Mixed Readings On Price Pressures

Analysts see PCE inflation readings as key to the Fed shifting to rate cuts.

Gabe Alpert Apr 24, 2024

After Earnings, Is Charles Schwab Stock a Buy, a Sell, or Fairly Valued?

With an increase in revenues, here’s what we think of Schwab’s stock.

Michael Wong, CFA Apr 24, 2024

Going Into Earnings, Is Apple Stock a Buy, a Sell, or Fairly Valued?

Amid concerns about iPhone sales, here’s what we think of Apple stock.

William Kerwin, CFA Apr 24, 2024

About the Author

View All Authors

Christine Benz

Director

More from Author

Christine Benz is director of personal finance and retirement planning for Morningstar, Inc. In that role, she focuses on retirement and portfolio planning for individual investors. She also co-hosts a podcast for Morningstar, The Long View, which features in-depth interviews with thought leaders in investing and personal finance.

Benz joined Morningstar in 1993. Before assuming her current role she served as a mutual fund analyst and headed up Morningstar’s team of fund researchers in the U.S. She also served as editor of Morningstar Mutual Funds and Morningstar FundInvestor.

She is a frequent public speaker and is widely quoted in the media, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, CNBC, and PBS. In 2020, Barron’s named her to its inaugural list of the 100 most influential women in finance; she appeared on the 2021 list as well. In 2021, Barron’s named her as one of the 10 most influential women in wealth management.

She holds a bachelor’s degree in political science and Russian language from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Transparency is our policy. Learn how it impacts everything we do

Transparency is how we protect the integrity of our work and keep empowering investors to achieve their goals and dreams. And we have unwavering standards for how we keep that integrity intact, from our research and data to our policies on content and your personal data.

We’d like to share more about how we work and what drives our day-to-day business.

How we make money

We sell different types of products and services to both investment professionals and individual investors. These products and services are usually sold through license agreements or subscriptions. Our investment management business generates asset-based fees, which are calculated as a percentage of assets under management. We also sell both admissions and sponsorship packages for our investment conferences and advertising on our websites and newsletters.

How we use your personal data

How we use your information depends on the product and service that you use and your relationship with us. We may use it to:

Verify your identity, personalize the content you receive, or create and administer your account.
Provide specific products and services to you, such as portfolio management or data aggregation.
Develop and improve features of our offerings.
Gear advertisements and other marketing efforts towards your interests.

To learn more about how we handle and protect your data, visit our privacy center.

How we approach editorial content

Maintaining independence and editorial freedom is essential to our mission of empowering investor success. We provide a platform for our authors to report on investments fairly, accurately, and from the investor’s point of view. We also respect individual opinions––they represent the unvarnished thinking of our people and exacting analysis of our research processes. Our authors can publish views that we may or may not agree with, but they show their work, distinguish facts from opinions, and make sure their analysis is clear and in no way misleading or deceptive.

To further protect the integrity of our editorial content, we keep a strict separation between our sales teams and authors to remove any pressure or influence on our analyses and research.

Read our editorial policy to learn more about our process.