Behavioral Insights | Morningstar

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Behavioral Science at Morningstar

We study how people make financial decisions and the obstacles they face in making effective choices. Our goal is to better understand investors—who they are, what it means for them to succeed, and how we can guide them along the way—then apply these insights to help investors reach their financial goals.

Identify Trends in Investment Popularity and Track Investor Preference

Developed using research from the Morningstar Behavioral Sciences team, Crowd Sense is a new retail dataset focused on making behaviors and interests more tangible so that investors can make the best investment selection when researching new funds.

Join the Morningstar Behavioral Research Circle

We’re looking for advisors and individuals to help us shape the way we help investors reach their goals.

The Investor Success Project

We look beyond the markets and focus on the tremendous potential for people to become investors and for current investors to meet and exceed their goals.

The Investor Success Project Image

Want to learn more about the team?

We welcome opportunities to collaborate on research to help investors. We also frequently share our research lessons at industry events and with the media.

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.