Morningstar

“At the end of the day, managers who are focused on earning a management fee and keeping assets and just not underperforming, you know, your average mutual fund whose job it is, is to never be below three or four Morningstar stars so that the four one K consult…”

“We decided that one of the best ways to do that was not to think about funds relative to their Lipper universes, but to think about them in terms of Morningstar style boxes, in terms of a way to convey that, because for retail investors and Morningstar spent s…”

“Don Phillips, who really invented the field of manager research, you know, I think he has a master's degree in literature from the University of Texas.”

“In fact, the majority of companies I cover at that point are bankrupt today.”

“So in 2007, the first time Morningstar had actually done a pre IPO analysis of a company was Mastercard. And I was pegged to cover Mastercard before there was any price on the stock. Morningstar usually had publicly available prices. So this was a first buildi…”

“We began to wrestle with that whole idea of what is important with a competitive advantage, and part of that was it wasn't about the absolute size, it was about the direction of that competitive advantage.”

“Porter was a consultant. His goal was to say, hey, dude, you run a widget company. How do you make your widget company better than the other widget company? He never answers the question, are widgets even a decent business?”

“To be totally blunt, equity research is a commodity. You take the logo off the top and you don't know who wrote it.”

“We had data back to the sixties and looked at every company that had done more than 15% returns on capital for more than 15 years. Totally arbitrary numbers. The idea was, instead of theorizing, let's just get the data. Let's get the companies that have done t…”