Morningstar

The site not the stock.

I have written about Morningstar a couple of times before. I subscribe to what I think is called the premium service. It cost about $120 per year. I like the X-ray function on the tools menu and the stock reports have a lot of information about each company. It has never been obvious to me that their opinions about stocks have particularly successful but I might be missing that part of the story.

What I can't figure out is the articles on the Stocks page and the ETF page. The stocks page has two articles on it, one by Pat Dorsey that is an updated version of an article first written on October 13, 2004 and the other is by Julie Stralow from May 20th that appears to a be a weekly column. There are other articles you can find. It looks like there are about two to four articles per week.

The ETF page has four articles. One looks like a couple of news items written by both Dieter Owen Bardy and Dan Culloton dated May 20. The other three are by Dan Culloton and dated April 12, 2005, May 10, 2005 and March 9, 2005 respectively.

Mr. Dorsey is a regular on Bulls and Bears on Fox News. He is a bottoms up guy through and through, to point of seeming to ignore what is going on in the world completely. That last point is my perception and may be wrong but I don't recall him factoring in the macro into his stock picking at all. I also find that he makes some very good stock picks and some very bad ones, like most people.

Mr. Culloton gets quoted in a measurable percentage of every ETF article published and it seems as though he does the majority of ETF work for Morningstar.

Anyone that writes for Morningstar has a high profile job and a very wide audience. It looks like they are all CFAs which is a very difficult designation to obtain, so they are no doubt all very smart people.

Being smart does not ensure knowledge or insight. As I read their articles I can not get a feel for how much these guys really know. I read a lot of stuff from plenty of people that I can tell know more than I do but not these guys. It may be something in the editorial process. When I wrote for Motley Fool I had several articles that had the meaning changed by an editor who did not know any better. It may also be the case that they are trying to dumb down the content. I think complex content can be explained in such a way that most Morningstar readers could grasp it though.

Pat is a bottoms up guy and I am not so my comments may just boil down to that distinction. Dan has written about applying bottoms up processes to ETFs, which as I wrote the other day does not make sense to me. I have never been impressed with Dan's process on anything of his I have read. Most of his content is simply a relay of factual information.

I may have this wrong or am being overly critical but this has been a theme of mine lately; there is dearth of good content.