Morningstar Investor Reviews

I am extremely disappointed by the lack of response from Morningstar Support and MorningstarInvestor UX. I paid for a subscription online and then downloaded MorningstarInvestor on my phone, then proceeded to log in. MorningstarInvestor kept saying to renew my membership (which was paid for already - I was able to use the web version just fine and used the same email account online and on MorningstarInvestor ). It never let me look up any securities or do my research on MorningstarInvestor . I would say that your platform is great - with great features - however all the goodies are useless if I cannot access what I paid for… hence the one star rating.

Who’s bright idea was it to add all the “white space” to the display of my portfolios v6.0? Almost half the width of my screen is just the name of the security. That now take up three lines of space when only one is needed. And each column of data now includes extra white space. So now I can basically the security name and one column of data at a time. What a disaster! There’s a famous expression of wisdom, “If it isn’t broken, don’t fixit.” Now you have broken what was working perfectly well. Please put it back. Or give me a setting to go back to the previous “compact” view. Maybe the new version looks better on a 4K monitor but that’s not the point of an iPhone app. All I can figure is that the person that signed off on this new design does not even use the product themselves. If you would like to know what updates would be useful to your users, I will be glad to help you. But until then, please, please pull this release down and republish the old version ASAP!

Update: now they are playing big brother and blocking you if they find your password used somewhere else. If I feel the need to have a security service, I certainly wouldn’t pick them.

Like others have said, the new “security” features are not user friendly! The whole idea is to check holding on the fly. If I have to go through this convoluted process each time I’ll go somewhere else. Which is unfortunate as I’ve used it for years. I would also add that the new “security” feature doesn’t really add much security. It just redirects you to a web site which I doubt really makes it more secure.

The iPhone app no longer works after the update. Worse yet paying for an app MS tech has been unable to fix in approximately 10 days. Help!!! Update Hang in there, while you release a new update and improvise the update. What does this jargon mean on a bottom line basis, your tech group has no idea what they are doing or your tech support have no idea of what you are doing. Neither of which is acceptable, the longer this goes on the worse MS looks. We are now going on 2 months with no fix for MorningstarInvestor to work on my iPhone. I have deleted and reinstalled MorningstarInvestor over 10 times at your direction without success. MorningstarInvestor works on my iMac and iPad. Tech support is nonexistent since the responses are so standard that it just feels like a stall tactic until I just stop bugging MS. The analytical data is great but if you are unable to access it on a mobile device, the value is very limited. Hope to receive a positive response soon.

Morningstar seems to change MorningstarInvestor frequently, so chances are that you’ll encounter a new login process every few months. As a result, it’s become annoyingly difficult to log-in sometimes.

Despite the recently multiple factor login security, I recently looked at my portfolio and found…that it wasn’t mine! My information was no where to be found, and the finances of someone else showed up. I logged off and back on, and my info appeared.

I called the Morningstar tel # that appears on MorningstarInvestor to report the security breach. The foreign call center worker didn’t grasp the sense of my report, I had to repeat myself and ask her to report the matter.

The most basic things, like a 1-year chart aren’t available anywhere in MorningstarInvestor . And all the basic info used to be on one page. I think they have deliberately made it harder to share screenshots and (on the website) removed the printable/PDF options so paying users can’t share the info, but in the process they have made it impossible for their paying customers to use. Both MorningstarInvestor and the website have gotten continually worse over the last 5 years or so. How is it that you have to go to another tab to find the P/E of a stock?! How is that not on the first page you pull up?! Just terrible.

I recently signed up for the Premier service & was initially disappointed to find that Stock Reports & recommendations for particular stocks are no longer available. Great feature before & the main reason that I signed up.
Downloaded MorningstarInvestor & wished to “Add To Watchlist” certain stocks. Although the feature is clearly there it would not work. As such I contacted customer service to see what was wrong.
I was told this feature (although there) is not available on MorningstarInvestor . “MorningstarInvestor is only to track investments & you may not be able to edit any data.” What must be done is to sign into the website & add the stocks there. Sounds pretty foolish to me.

Great app for tracking investments and getting good information.
However, there appears to be a lot of privacy abuse if you read the details. These state that there is frequent sharing of information with unidentified "partners". This information identifies a great deal about the individual (including age, sex, investments, changes in investments, and who knows what else.)
It is also stated they make money from sharing this info. to maintain and support the
sight. Very creepy, and I feel it is an infringement on my privacy.
I am discontinuing use of the and hope to have my historical information removed.

It looks like the Morningstar’s v5.0 upgrade to make “logon more secure” basically requires users to log in with their password every time the want to use MorningstarInvestor . Prior to v5.0, I could logon once and keep using MorningstarInvestor without a logon prompt as long as I didn’t close it. After v5.0, I need to logon anew after some indeterminate idle time.

In my opinion, that will lower security because users will start using simple passwords that they can remember rather that using a strong password with randomly generated characters, numbers, and special characters, which they store in a strong password manager. If Morningstar wants to make logon more secure AND user friendly, they would adopt Face ID as a logon token like all of my other financial apps such as bank accounts and brokerage accounts.

I have been a MorningStar subscriber for years. The company provides easy to understand and as far as I can tell, sound investment analysis.

I do not like that MorningstarInvestor does not allow creation/ modification of portfolios the way the website does. I also don’t like the fact that members cannot easily access their account, see the price they are paying per month or year, and I am not thrilled with Morningstar decreased coverage/ analysis of price vs fair value data on closed end funds.

I decided to finally get Morningstar Investor as I use the web version of this service often. I am a big fan of the quality of content and breadth of information - delivered very professionally, as well. However, frustration started immediately after downloading MorningstarInvestor . I am not able to sign in to my Premium account (which works fine on the web version). I consistently receive the notice “An error occurred. Please try again.” even after reinstalling. Very disappointed by this. Great company & service and worthy of 5 stars if this issue is resolved.

I’m using MorningstarInvestor to watch the stocks I'm investing in, but recently some of them have changed their names or split into multiple companies. So I would try to add the new company and it would show up on my watchlist as “dummy” and not by the actual company name. And the other problem showed up in the edit feature for my watchlist. I tried to remove a company from it that recently changed its name and that company doesn’t show up in the watchlist editor. Yet that same company shows up in my actual watchlist. MorningstarInvestor would get a 5 star review from me if these bugs were ironed out so hopefully a future patch can fixes these issues I’ve encountered.

April 2022: I love MorningStar. The iPhone app, not so much. 3 Stars is generous. Supposedly there’s a beta version coming. The beta version apparently can look at your actual portfolio, so that it can be better analyzed. I’m still waiting. From what I’ve seen of Beta, this will be five stars. We will see.
2019 Nov: I was asked if I liked the changes. I hadn’t noticed any. No longer freezes as in 2015. Can’t compare funds and still no portfolio analysis. I don’t need a diagram. Otherwise very useful. Jan 2015 and still freezes often. Delete & reinstall again Dec 2014. Freezes often. it does load faster but the information in the watchlists that I have created is not there. MS said they standardized the information so that it would load quicker. I would rather have the information. Not sure why we can't have both though. Add portfolio analysis. MS iPad has it. I can get it on the website of my iPhone for Vanguard and for MorningStar. I contacted support without any meaningful response.

Morningstar itself has good information but they’ve made MorningstarInvestor impossible to use. Despite being logged into my account, anytime I search a new security, it won’t show me the stuff I’m paying for. It used to force me to thru an arduous process to login and connect to the website via Safari. Now it won’t even let me do that but wants to force me to resubscribe thereby making MorningstarInvestor useless on the iPhone.

Update: Sent a message to support about these issues. They almost immediately resolved. Apparently the issue was due to a permissions issue related to my account so the knock on MorningstarInvestor was not entirely fair. For now, I bump up to 3 stars and will readjust higher if it stays fixed. As the functioning app is much more useful and less annoying

I like the portfolio option to follow certain securities. That works really well. The Markets section of MorningstarInvestor is where I lose some interest - the color options for gainers/losers is too hard to see and I find that rather worthless. The News items I enjoy reading but is not mobile friendly - text is too small to read for most articles. Needs a lot of work there.

I like MorningstarInvestor better than say Google, Yahoo, or MSN simply because Morningstar is known for being much more objective in their reporting, whereas the others are too swayed by Democratic and left leaning narratives.

I like MorningstarInvestor but it needs to work.

I have a premium account, and while a new subscriber, I use Morningstar data extensively. The portfolio tracking feature is nice on the iPhone, and I especially like that I can also follow the same portfolio on my iPad (which you can't do with Apple's default Stocks app, because it doesn't exist for the iPad).

Sometime the portfolio view acts a little buggy. Sometimes it won't let me scroll up the page, initiating a page refresh (even if it just refreshed) rather than scrolling. After the refresh it starts working okay for a little bit. It's annoying, but it's manageable.

However, I really wish the iPhone app had all the financial data (10 yr history, key ratios, etc) that the website does. The iPad app comes closer, but really, I just end up using the website on both devices when I need full access to the financial data.

I cannot find a “settings” menu for MorningstarInvestor. It would be useful to easily set up MorningstarInvestor to open in the “Markets” or another window that is not one’s own Portfolio. I have also not found an easily accessible two-factor authentication setting for optional enhanced access security. While these and other features may have possibly been built into MorningstarInvestor and I may have simply missed them, the fact that I could not readily find them, with 3 decades of corporate-level computing under my belt, does not show well for their user-friendliness. What is left for computer newbies or digitally-averse folk?

Originally I rated it one star: "MorningstarInvestor is clunky and difficult to navigate. I love Morningstar, but their app is pretty much useless. I just use their mobile website instead."

Updated: MorningstarInvestor is greatly improved and has most of the more useful information carried by its full web site. Easy to look up securities and add to a watch list. Easy to check your portfolio and read current articles. It doesn't have everything the full site offers, but it has a lot of what people would look for when on the go. Nice work!

Sadly, Morningstar has SIGNIFICANTLY decreased the content of their Premier application (not to be confused:This is the name of the product—it is certainly not a “premier” product. )

This is not unprecedented at Morningstar! In 30 years of dealing with them, I have yet to see an improvement without a significant price increase AND if a price remains stable, you will find there is less and less information available.

Morningstar was once a resource for professionals. As the internet improved, they attempted to capture more income by creating products that were for the “independent” investor. In the last couple of years, they have reduced the abilities of Premier. To recover those abilities, individuals would have to step up to professional products. Those products are massive overkill for the individual investor as they are designed for planning for, and following portfolios, of client bases.

Interestingly, Premier has no real expense to Morningstar—it is simply a distillation of information they must maintain for their professional products. Everyone is, it seems, paying Morningstar (Broker/Dealers, RIA’s, IARs, individual brokers, ADVERTISERS........, and individual investors). At present, they have very little competition.

MorningstarInvestor has a competitively priced premium plan. The information rating stocks and ETFs is valuable because it can benefit your portfolio. I was not able to use MorningstarInvestor because I have a portfolio with Robinhood that I could not connect to Morningstar. Unfortunately I need to manually enter all the information which means each buy and sell, which I won’t do.

Morningstar (M) packs a lot of customizable data for summary viewing. My main portfolio table has about 10 Headings with key data on each of my holdings. The main headings are Dividend Yield, Fair Value (FV) and the % of Fair Value at the current price. I can quickly look at this table and see what stocks are near FV which suggests divestment.

One caution is that if you look at their Fair Values vs actual price for 10 or more years (which is one of many choices M offers) they often correlate on a lag basis. So they seem to be “late to the party” when a stock declines significantly, and then slow on the uptake if it gains value back. That’s not all bad as they want to be fairly certain before making a change in FV, which is a good thing.

Overall, there is much more to like about M than not. Their Bull and Bear rationale for each stock is a notable plus as it shows the breadth of their overall analysis of each stock they rate. Good luck with your Investing!

Very easy and simplistic app that gives you all the information you need. Their equity style box is a nice way to see a simple snap shot of the market. You have access to stock’s rating as well as various new articles.

The only thing I wish they would add are widgets for iOS so I could see the equity style box when ever I open my phone. That would be a great addition.

The new mobile app now requires the user sign in AND authorize Morningstar to share user information with others. Presumably this is Morningstar’s answer to Apple’s opt-out of sharing data function but it is infuriating and I already paid for premium so what option do I have? Don’t agree to the sharing and then not be able to use what I paid for? Morningstar, please correct this annoying and heavy handed change to what was a 5 star app. Update - 1 day after submitting my comment I received a reply that MorningstarInvestor was updated and the annoying repeated sign in requirement was fixed. 5 stars!

Morningstar is one of the most useful financial apps ever! Once you enter the market symbol of all of your investments and the price at purchase (including entering the purchase price again each time you buy the same stock you already own), you’re done. MorningstarInvestor keeps track of all of the markets’ minute-by-minute fluctuations and by simply pulling down on the screen and releasing it, updates the current market values. You can add any investment you own as long as it has a symbol associated with any of the world’s markets. I use it many times a day just to “check in” to see what’s happening in the broad financial markets as well as my own investments. You’ll love it 😍 ‼️

Of all the places I’ve used over the years, this has been the absolute best site and now app, ever! You have access to every bit of information you could ever need and then some. The added benefit is that they figured out how to display this massive amount of info in a nice and organized way onto a small screen. I pay for only two services; Morningstar and Zack’s. My brokerage (Firstrade) actually uses Morningstar for their research also. So that’s a huge benefit to me.