Morningstar Runs the Numbers

Inspired by Harper's Index (with a tip of the hat to FiveThirtyEight's Significant Digits blog), Morningstar Runs the Numbers uses a numbers-based approach to highlight recent Morningstar research, along with some outside news stories.

$55 David Meats laid out the case that the crude oil market is going to face oversupply next year. This leads to our energy teams midcycle pricing forecast of $55 a barrel West Texas Intermediate, below many other forecasts. He thinks U.S. production will be the driver of the supply:

Shale growth is the main component of the glut we anticipate after March 2018. Huge growth in that arena is near certain next year, and this onslaught of new production will probably coincide with the potential expiration of OPEC's voluntary curtailments, overwhelming crude markets once again.

55

In the Dividend Focus, Sonia Vora shares why she thinks

76% Morningstar's director of policy research, Aron Szapiro, wrote a comment letter to the SEC about how the rules governing how broker/dealers and registered investment advisors can give advice should change. Szapiro emphasized that given that most investors are inexperienced, a disclosure-based approach is insufficient:

Morningstar believes that investors' confusion about standards of conduct applicable to different kinds of relationships is likely to continue for some time, and disclosures alone will not clarify those standards for many investors. Most investors are not very experienced and probably would not invest in the absence of the defined-contribution system. For example, from our examination of the 2013 Survey of Consumer Finance, we noted that that 76% of investors invest exclusively in tax-privileged retirement plans, and these investors often do not understand fundamental investing concepts such as the importance of taking risk for long-term investing.

62%

We remain confident that Oracle's SaaS business can carry the water as Oracle works through these challenges, but we are maintaining our $46 fair value estimate and continue to view shares as overvalued.

$999

Quite simply we don't think there's an Android competitor that could sell phones at these prices because they don't have the customer loyalty, the customer stickiness that Apple has.

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