What are Morningstar's indexes and ticker symbols?
What are these indexes designed for?
What is unique about Morningstar's indexes?
What are Morningstar's indexes and ticker symbols?
Based on the same methodology as the Morningstar Style Box™, Morningstar has developed a comprehensive family of 16 indexes targeting 97% of the U.S. equity market. The Morningstar indexes include a broad market index, three cap indexes, three composite style indexes, and nine style indexes.
Index Name Ticker
Broad Market Index
Morningstar US MarketSM Index $MSTAR
Cap Indexes
Morningstar Large CapSM Index $MLCP
Morningstar Mid CapSM Index $MMCP
Morningstar Small CapSM Index $MSCP
Composite Style Indexes
Morningstar US GrowthSM Index $MGRO
Morningstar US CoreSM Index $MCOR
Morningstar US ValueSM Index $MVAL
Style Indexes
Morningstar Large GrowthSM Index $MLGR
Morningstar Mid GrowthSM Index $MMGR
Morningstar Small GrowthSM Index $MSGR
Morningstar Large CoreSM Index $MLCR
Morningstar Mid CoreSM Index $MMCR
Morningstar Small CoreSM Index $MSCR
Morningstar Large ValueSM Index $MLVL
Morningstar Mid ValueSM Index $MMVL
Morningstar Small ValueSM Index $MSVL
What are these indexes designed for?
Portfolio Building Blocks
Asset allocation: Morningstar's indexes enable a thorough assessment of style-related risk-return tradeoffs in portfolio construction, as well as precise control and monitoring of portfolio style.
Investment vehicles: Morningstar indexes were designed to support investment creation from the beginning. Comprising the best practices in index construction—broad market representation, investability, and controlled turnover—the indexes are a sound basis for index funds, exchange traded funds and derivative products.
Performance Measures
Performance evaluation: Performance measurement and attribution based on the indexes provide a powerful means of understanding the factors that affect portfolio return and risk on an ongoing basis.
Market monitoring: The behavior of stocks of different styles can be monitored on an up-to-the-minute basis using Morningstar's style-based indexes. Understanding the behavior of different stock types is a crucial input to decision-making when selecting individual funds for investment or in constructing a diversified, style-controlled portfolio.
What is unique about Morningstar's indexes?
In addition to it's robust 10-factor methodology, Morningstar's indexes are unique in several ways:
Distinct
Diversification depends upon the ability to make clear investment distinctions. For the purposes of asset allocation and portfolio assembly, Morningstar's style box methodology was designed to uniquely classify stocks by style and capitalization. To enable investors to create non-overlapping and comprehensive portfolios, our methodology maps each stock to only one of the 9 style boxes.
Many index families use an overlapping index approach where two indexes contain the same stock. Other families choose to split the market cap of a single stock between growth and value indexes if their style is not clear. To Morningstar, this blurring of distinctions makes asset allocation more difficult.
Style Pure
Morningstar's holds the view that not all stocks are growth or value. Where neither growth or value characteristics predominate, a stock is classified as core. Although a few index families recognize core or neutral stocks exist, these families exclude them in their style indexes. Morningstar's family is unique in that it offers the ability to target investment in companies that generally represent the mainstream and are often "blue chip" holdings. Also, because we divide the style universe into core, in addition to growth and value, the characteristics of the Morningstar's style indexes are more pure than other style index families. This affords investors greater possibilities for diversification in asset allocation.
Designed for Investability
From the beginning, Morningstar's indexes have incorporated the best practices in index construction. Designed to support portfolio assembly, they are completely rules-based, free-float weighted, fully investable, buffered to limit unnecessary turnover, calculated in real-time, and end-of-day values are available in four currencies.
See Also