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Morningstar User’s Guide

May 10, 2020 by Rob Berger

Some of the links in this article may be affiliate links, meaning at no cost to you I earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase or open an account. I only recommend products or services that I (1) believe in and (2) would recommend to my mom. Advertisers have had no control, influence, or input on this article, and they never will.

Welcome to the Morningstar User's Guide. We're going to cover everything you need to know about using and getting the most advantage out of Morningstar. In this first article and video, we'll cover an overview of Morningstar. We will also look at some resources you'll need as we work through this guide.

It's my hope that this will help you become a better, more confident investor.

Table Of Contents
  1. Morningstar User's Guide Video
  2. Morningstar Overview
  3. Issues with Morningstar's New Website
  4. This Morningstar User's Guide
    • Part 1: The Data
    • Part 2: Using The Data
    • Part 3: Portfolio Manager
    • Part 4: Morningstar Tools
  5. Morningstar Resources You Need Handy for this User's Guide
    • Membership
    • Snapshot and Glossary
    • Morningstar Search Tool

Morningstar User's Guide Video

Morningstar Overview

Morningstar was founded in 1984. Before the internet as we know it, by Joe Mansueto. The story is that he started it in his apartment in Chicago with about $80,000. I don't know if that's true, but regardless, he started Morningstar in 1984. Today, it's a publicly traded company trading under the ticker MORN. It went public in 2005.

Last year, Morningstar generated about $1.2 billion in revenue. By my calculations, individual investors who pay for the premium version of Morningstar accounted for only about $22 million. Most of the revenue comes from tools designed for professional money managers and investment advisors. Some of these tools can cost tens of thousands of dollars a year.

The good news is that Morningstar made a lot of its data available for free to individual investors. And its premium version, which offers additional tools, is only $199. So that's the good news.

Issues with Morningstar's New Website

Now, there is some bad news. Last year Morningstar made some substantial changes to its website. They launched the new website in July 2019. The look of the new site is an improvement, sort of.

Here's what the old site looked like:

Morningstar old website

And here's the current website design:

Morningstar new website

The problem is that the functionality took a big hit for several reasons.

First of all, they took away a lot of the tools and data that were available in the old version of the site. For example, the removed the after-tax returns of mutual funds, which I thought was a very helpful data point. There are ways to get at that information, and we will cover that when we get to it in the series. That's the good news, we can still get back to this old version, for now.

Second, they haven't bothered to update the user guide. The Premium User Guide for paid members still reflects the old website design and functionality. I reached out to Morningstar support, thinking I just couldn't find the new guide. Nope. They haven't updated it. I guess that makes this User's Guide all the more important!

Finally, many of the tools that still exist are really hard to find. In the old version they had a menu item called “Tools.” Seems simple enough. That page now no longer exists. So there's no one page to go to to see all of the tools Morningstar offers investors.

This Morningstar User's Guide

This guide will be divided into four parts.

Part 1: The Data

The first part is going to be simply understanding the data. It'll be creating a number of videos that walk through all of the data about mutual funds, ETFs an stocks that Morningstar offers.

Part 2: Using The Data

Now that we have all this data from Part 1, how do we actually use it to make important investment decisions? That's what we will cover in Part 2. First, we'll figure out of all of the data you get from Morningstar, what pieces of it are really important. And then once we know that, we'll cover how to use the data.

How do we use it to pick a mutual fund in our 401k? How do we compare two mutual funds? So we'll be looking at that in part two.

Part 3: Portfolio Manager

In Part 3, we're going to be looking at the portfolio manager in Morningstar.
We will walk through the Portfolio Manager, showing you how to set up your own portfolio, how to add new holdings, and then the different ways you can use the tool to evaluate your investments.

Part 4: Morningstar Tools

In Part 4 we will look at Morningstar Tools. These include fund and stock screeners, calculators, and the X-Ray tool.

Morningstar Resources You Need Handy for this User's Guide

To finish out this brief overview, I want to talk about some things that that you want to keep in mind that are important as we move through the series.

Membership

The first is the Morningstar membership options. For individual investors like you and me, there's are two options. At a minimum, you'll want the Morningstar basic membership. It's free, and you will need it to create and monitor your portfolio. If you want the premium version, it costs $199 per year.

Here's what the two options cover:

Morningstar Membership Options
Try Morningstar for Free

While I'm a Premium member, it's not necessary for most people.

Snapshot and Glossary

Two more things briefly, that I think you should focus on, or at least have handy. The first is Morningstar Snapshot definitions.This gives you the definitions of key terms and concepts that we will encounter throughout this series.

For example, Morningstar categorizes mutual funds as a stock, bond or balanced fund. One might think that a bond mutual fund invests in bonds. Well, it does, but Morningstar categorizes a fund as a bond fund if at least 80% of its assets are on bonds. As a result, a “bond” mutual fund could also have a not insignificant amount invested in equities.

As another example, consider Morningstar's definition of an international stock fund. According to Snapshot, it's a stock fund that has invested 40% or more of its equity holdings in foreign stocks. So don't assume you know Morningstar's definition of these terms.

A similar tool is the Morningstar Glossary. It offers a wider range of investing terms.

Morningstar Search Tool

The last thing I want to show you in this overview is the search box on Morningstar. This really is the door through which you'll find a lot of the things that you need on Morningstar. For example, you can you the search box in several ways to find key information on Morningstar:

  • Ticker: Search an investment by its ticker symbol
  • Name: Search a mutual fund or stock by name
  • Screener: Search the term “Screener” to find Morningstar's stock and fund screeners
  • Tool: Search the term “Tool” to find Morningstar's calculators and other investment tools

Filed Under: Investing, Tools

12 Personal Finance, Investing and Retirement Tools

May 9, 2020 by Rob Berger

Some of the links in this article may be affiliate links, meaning at no cost to you I earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase or open an account. I only recommend products or services that I (1) believe in and (2) would recommend to my mom. Advertisers have had no control, influence, or input on this article, and they never will.

Personal finance, investing and retirement planning tools can help you make the most of your money. From budgeting to investing, saving to improving your credit, the resources below will empower you to take back control of your finances.

Unless noted otherwise, I use each of the tools listed below:

Tools I Use

Empower

Update

Personal Capital is now called Empower, and the free tool is now called the Empower Personal Dashboard. Nothing about the tool has changed, and it's still free.

Empower is a comprehensive free financial management tool. It can do just about everything. You can connect your bank accounts, credit cards, and investment accounts. Once you link your accounts, Empower can track your budget, cash flow, and upcoming bills. But it's much more than a budgeting app.

The app tracks your net worth over time. It also tracks all of your investments, including retirement and brokerage accounts. Empower then provides automated analysis of your asset allocation, investment fees, and retirement planning.

Empower also offers a high-yield cash account. It's FDIC-insured and offers a competitive rate.

I've used Empower for years. Based on my experience, I created a Empower Review and User's Guide if you want more details.

New Retirement

Unlike Personal Capital, New Retirement is a paid tool. It's worth every penny. In my opinion, it is the most robust retirement planning software available directly to consumers. You can use the tool to model everything from retirement spending to Roth conversions to social security and medicare premiums.

There is a learning curve to New Retirement, but it's worth the time and effort. They also give you a free 14-day trial to check it out.

You can also check out this Q&A session I held where we walked through many features of the software.

Wealthfront

Wealthfront is an automated investing service often referred to as a robo-advisor. It's similar in theory to a target date retirement fund, however, it gives you more control over your asset allocation. It also offers excellent tools to understand your investments.

Wealthfront also offers a high-yield cash account, which is what I use Wealthfront for. I don't use its robo-advisor services (see Betterment below).

I should add, however, that Wealthfront doesn't offer the absolute best rates. Today, the best deposit rate I can find is through SaveBetter. This company partners with FDIC-insured banks to allow its customers to pick and choose from multiple banks all through one account.

Vanguard

Vanguard is a mutual fund company that popularized index fund investing. You can set up just about any type of account, including IRAs and taxable accounts. From there, you can invest in target date retirement funds and low-cost index funds. I've used Vanguard's funds and brokerage services for years.

Fidelity

Fidelity also offers low-cost index funds and any account type you'd need. If I had to pick one broker to use, it would be Fidelity. There are several reasons for this:

  • Technology: Fidelity's website and app are easy to use and provide a wealth of information about your accounts and the markets.
  • Full View: Powered by eMoneyAdvisor, Full View is a free tool that enables you to track all of your accounts, including those held outside of Fidelity. While it doesn't compare to Personal Capital, in my opinion, it's still a useful tool.
  • Customer Service: I've never had a bad experience with Fidelity. No company is perfect, but Fidelity offers some of the best customer service I've experience with any investment platform.

Betterment

Betterment is a robo-advisor, similar to Wealthfront. They both offer a simple way to start investing, but they both do charge a fee. While the fee is modest, we know from Retire Before Mom and Dad that every basis point in fees costs us a lot of money over our lifetimes. Still, I think robo-advisors are a reasonable choice for those who want a service that can handle your asset allocation and rebalancing.

I use Betterment to invest our credit card rewards. You can check out my video on Betterment, which shows you my account and some of Betterment's features.

Portfolio Visualizer

This free tool is one of the best I've found at evaluating the historical performance of a portfolio. You can add specific investments (stocks, ETFs or mutual funds) and Portfolio Visualizer will return the historical returns of the portfolio along with a wealth of data (e.g., CAGR, standard deviation, worst drawdown). You can also evaluate portfolios using asset classes rather than specific investments.

Another feature I use is its Monte Carlo simulation. It's particularly useful for modeling retirement spending scenarios, like the 4% Rule.

Here's a video guide to Portfolio Visualizer.

FI Calc App

FI Calc is a free tool that models retirement spending based on a specific drawdown strategy. You can easily set your years in retirement, nest egg balance, first-year spending, and select one of several drawdown strategies. The tool also allows you to model other retirement income and one-time large expenditures.

The results, based on historical data, show by year (from 1926 to the present) whether your money would have lasted through retirement. Importantly, it also shows those years when you would have almost run out of money.

Morningstar

Morningstar is arguably the best source of information on stocks, mutual funds and ETFs. Enter a ticker and Morningstar returns a wealth of information including a fund's expense ratio, investing style, historical performance and volatility, and top investments.

Morningstar Investor is its new portfolio tracking tool. I'm still testing it, but my initial impression is that it is a step in the right direction but still needs a lot of work.

Tiller Money

Tiller Money combines an automated budgeting app with the power of a spreadsheet. Once you connect your bank and credit card accounts to Tiller, it downloads your transaction data and balances into either Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel. From there you can evaluate and categorize your spending.

1Password

A password manager is a must. It enables you to use complex, lengthy passwords without have to remember them. I used LastPass for years, but after its data breach issues, I switched to 1Password. It's very easy to use, works on all my devices, and I can share passwords with anybody I choose without actually revealing the password to them.

Other Tools Worth Considering

YNAB

YNAB, short for You Need a Budget, is the budgeting tool I use every day. It automatically downloads all of your transactions from bank accounts (checking and savings), as well as credit cards. You can categorize your expenses, run reports, and understand where your money is going.

It is a subscription model, but the cost is reasonable. I've found it to be the best tool to manage your money.

Mint.com

I used Mint for many years. It's a free online money management tool. You connect your financial accounts to Mint. The app then downloads your transactions and categorizes them for you. It's not perfect, but it's right more often than not. You can then see where your money has gone and plan your budget going forward.

While Mint offers a decent product, there are some really good Mint alternatives worth checking out.

Filed Under: Tools

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