Morningstar

 A few years ago Morningstar had a fine web site. It was designed for investors to give them useful information and interesting opinions about investing. Some of their stuff was behind a pay wall, but a large amount of it was free to anyone who signed up with his email address.  A reader could look up information about stocks and funds and track prices of investments easily. The usually well written articles were focused on investing rather than politics. They were followed by often lively and informative sections of comments by readers.  It was a good place to do some basic research, get some new ideas, and share thoughts with others with similar interests.

A pessimist would have said it was too good to last, and in this case he would have been right. Things began to change noticeably when Morningstar brought on a climate change and ESG guru to deliver repeating homilies and exhortations on the green religion. Many readers found his stuff annoying, irrelevant, and an inappropriate deviation from Morningstar’s former practice of staying out of the game of political advocacy and said so in comments after his articles. At least they did until Morningstar decided to stop printing comments from readers. From there things have gone downhill. These days the site has gone whole hog on the faith and features multiple ESG puff pieces, sales talks, and infomercials just about every day.  In the last year or so it has begun regularly publishing articles pushing various sorts of  “diversity”, race and sex quotas in businesses, and the supposed need to treat investors in different ways based on their sex or  race. (A recent article pondered what “Latinix” investors might want from a financial advisor. I would think they might want competent help in investing successfully, but that’s just a guess.)

Some of the good writers are still there, and one can still get useful information on stocks and funds, but  the emphasis has changed. That may have created an opportunity for a competitor to come along and do what Morningstar used to do. I’d be a customer, and I think there would be many others.