Joe Mansueto Quotes

103 Joe Mansueto Quotes

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[In 2004] Because I’m the founder of Morningstar, you might think I invest most of my personal assets in mutual funds. The truth is I own few mutual funds. Nearly all my assets are in stocks. Although I love funds, I have an even greater passion for stocks.
Joe Mansueto

[In 2004 on mutual funds.] Funds are great for those who don’t want to spend a lot of time doing research. But if you enjoy analysing companies – and I think it’s tremendous fun – you can do perfectly well investing in equities yourself.
Joe Mansueto

[In 2004] After graduation… I stumbled across ‘The Money Masters’ by John Train and read about Warren Buffett. Now that was exciting. Buffett used an approach I could readily grasp and inspired me by showing how much fund and intellectually challenging investing could be.
Joe Mansueto

[After graduating and reading the Money Masters] I went back and read all the Berkshire Hathaway annual reports. My life changed course as a result.
Joe Mansueto

The idea for Morningstar came from trying to teach myself equity analysis. I called regularly to get the mutual fund reports from managers I admired – people such as Kurt Lindner (Lindner Funds), George Michaelis (Source Capital), Michael Price (Mutual Shares), Bill Ruane (Sequoia Fund), John Templeton (Templeton Funds), and Ralph Wagner (Acorn). I examined their holdings to see what stocks they were buying and tried to figure out why they were buying them. One day, when I had all these shareholder reports scattered across my dining room table, I thought it would be useful if someone compiled all that valuable information into a book. The proverbial light bulb clicked. I started to research the mutual fund industry. I could see that it was growing nicely and that there were few sources to help investors make intelligent decisions about funds. Thus, Morningstar was born.
Joe Mansueto

By bringing a stock perspective to the mutual fund world, we began to define the Morningstar approach to fund investing. It’s hard to believe now, but back then investors purchased mutual funds based on recent returns and not much else. Morningstar brought rigorous, fundamental analysis to the industry.
Joe Mansueto

[On Morningstar in the early days.] We realized that by looking carefully at the stocks a fund owned, we could understand the manager’s strategy more clearly. So we developed our equity expertise as a way of doing better fund analysis.
Joe Mansueto

[On existing equity research available in the marketplace.] We thought we could do better.
Joe Mansueto

Our approach to equity analysis builds on the Ben Graham and Warren Buffett school of investing. It would be hard to find two better mentors – and we’re grateful and indebted to them for all that they have done for investors… concepts such as ‘Margin of Safety’ and ‘Economic Moats’.
Joe Mansueto

By looking closely at many companies, you’ll see common themes that drive their success or failure.
Joe Mansueto



You must ask some questions. How is the world changing? How will those changes affect this company’s prospects? You can begin to see the challenge and the fun of investing.
Joe Mansueto

Don’t be swayed by what the ‘experts’ say – even us.
Joe Mansueto

[Benjamin] Graham and [Warren] Buffett often point out that if your reasoning is right, that’s all you need to worry about.
Joe Mansueto

[In May 2006] More than half of the world’s investable assets are outside the U.S.
Joe Mansueto

[On his Christmas Tree business in December 1978 at the age of 22.] I guess I broke even. I realized that the key thing is how you manage your inventory. If you’re left with too many trees at the end, that can kill you. I think if I had done it another year, it would have been a moneymaker.
Joe Mansueto

[In June 2006] I always enjoyed just kind of seeing how business works. At the end of the day, you have more money in your pocket than at the beginning of the day. It’s kind of interesting how that works.
Joe Mansueto

[On his first deal as a child seeing a Ham radio at a festival selling at big discount.] I knew it was worth, say, $300. And this guy was selling it for $100. I remember borrowing $100 from the guy’s father who took me. And I went and sold it for about $300. And you know, as a sixth grader to make $200 in a month, I was in heaven. I thought, Gee, this is easy. How you can buy something and sell it for more – I was just kind of amazed how that works.
Joe Mansueto

[When investing in mutual funds on looking one night at all these mutual funds prospectuses spread out on his dining room table. And the idea that would lead to founding Morningstar] I thought, Boy, wouldn’t it be really interesting if somebody compiled all these things into a compendium, so I wouldn’t have to make these calls every three months? Gee, maybe this could be a business. You could publish a book on mutual funds with comprehensive information, with the goal of helping investors make better decisions about the funds they were buying.
Joe Mansueto

[In June 2006 on Morningstar’s salespeople not being allowed to talk to Morningstar’s analysts to ward off conflicts of interest.] I think it’s very fair. I think it's only natural to evaluate the evaluator. We've tried to be very open and transparent in how we run the business, and let people make their own judgments about who we are, what we do, and how we do it. For the regulators to be looking at this, it's perfectly fine. These are legitimate things to inquire about.
Joe Mansueto

[In June 2006 on Time Out Chicago that he owns only having been launched a year prior.] It’s not making money. Nor do we plan for it to make money for several years. That’s just how it is in the magazine business. But there’s some real momentum behind it in terms of the circulation, in terms of the advertising support.
Joe Mansueto



[In June 2006] True, the magazine business is a bit in the doldrums today. But in my view, it's more cyclical than secular. It's not a long-term decline for the magazine business if you've got a strong franchise. The magazine business is not the newspaper business. Google and Craig's List are a real threat to classified advertising. But a monthly magazine-I think it's pretty hard to re-create that experience on the Web. If you look at Time Warner, their magazine business does, I don't know, $5 billion in sales, a billion in profit? I mean, that's not chump change.
Joe Mansueto

[On the magazine businesses he owns in June 2006.] They’re very creative, interesting businesses. I love to read. I’m a magazine junkie. And so there’s something about the great journalism, combined with compelling graphics, nice paper-stock - that whole package I find very attractive if it’s done right.
Joe Mansueto

[In June 2006 on suggestions that he buy more magazines.] The magazines are fun, interesting things. Might something pop up? It may. But I’ve told them, ‘Let’s get these magazines working first, before we broach the subject of buying more.
Joe Mansueto

[In June 2006 on putting about $250,000 into Morningstar during it’s first five years of operation with half of this coming from savings bonds his father had bought for him as a child.] I had these savings bonds that my dad gave me when I graduated. You know, it's kind of touching when you see them, because they all have dates on them. I was born in September 1956. So there's one dated September 1956 for $100. And then there'd be one from October 1956. And so every month, my dad is going to the bank and buying me savings bonds since I was born. I felt that that's money that I didn't want to lose.
Joe Mansueto

[In 2002 on his brother coming down with what seemed like a bad flu later diagnosed as West Nile virus.] I remember I had lunch with him, he was saying, ‘I'm feeling bad; I think I'm just going to go home and sleep.' And then a week later he's in the hospital, and a couple days later he's on a respirator.
Joe Mansueto

[On his brother catching West Nile virus.] He had a very severe form of it where basically it was like polio. You lose the capacity to move your muscles.
Joe Mansueto

[On his brother passing away on the 30th of May 2003 on the way home from physical therapy.] I feel like I’ve led a golden life. With the exception of losing my brother. Compared to that, I've never had any bad thing happen to me. I still wake up in the middle of the night and think about it. We were very close.
Joe Mansueto

[On moving Morningstar’s office in 2007 if all goes to plan.] It’s nice. It’s not the Sears Tower. It’s taller than Marshall Field’s, but it’s not as tall as many of the skyscrapers in Chicago.
Joe Mansueto

[On ‘On Walden Pond’ by David Thoreau.] It was one of the first books I read when I was at the University of Chicago. I can still remember sitting in Regenstein Library, sitting in one of those very comfortable chairs, finishing that book, wondering, Gee, how is Thoreau going to end this book? And I get to that last line: ‘The sun is but a morning star.' And I pause, and look out over the quad, and the snow is coming down, and I think to myself: What the hell does that mean?
Joe Mansueto

[In June 2006 on David Thoreau’s line of ‘The sun is but a morning star.’ And the meaning of the origin of the ‘Moringstar’ name.] It's an optimistic statement. Something that's been around as long as the sun is still in its infancy. It's still a morning star. There's a rebirth that's just beginning. Thoreau, to me, is about independence, self-reliance, thrift. That's what Walden's all about.
Joe Mansueto



[In June 2006 on Thoreau not sharing the same views about accumulating wealth.] Well, OK. It's not a perfect analogy. That's why it's not the Thoreau Company
Joe Mansueto

When I started Morningstar in 1984, my goal was to help individuals invest in mutual funds. Back then, a few financial publications carried performance data, and that was about it. By providing institutional-quality information at affordable prices, I thought we could meet a growing need.
Joe Mansueto

I wanted to build a business with an ‘economic moat.’ Warren Buffett coined this term, which refers to the sustainable advantages that protect a company against competitors – the way a moat protects a castle.
Joe Mansueto

[In March 2008] Economic moats made so much sense to me that the concept is the foundation for our company and for our stock analysis.
Joe Mansueto

I saw a clear market need when I started Morningstar, but I also wanted a business with the potential for a moat. Why spend time, money, and energy only to watch competitors take away our customers? The business I envisioned would be hard for a competitor to replicate.
Joe Mansueto

We believe investors should focus their long-term investments on companies with wide economic moats.
Joe Mansueto

Wide-moat companies are great candidates for anyone’s core portfolio.
Joe Mansueto

Many people invest by reacting: ‘My brother-in-law recommended it’ or ‘I read about it in Money.’ It’s also easy to get distracted by daily price gyrations and pundits who pontificate about short-term market swings. Far better to have a conceptual anchor to help you evaluate stocks and build a rational portfolio. That’s where moats are invaluable.
Joe Mansueto

Although investing remains an art, we’ve attempted to make indentifying companies with moats more of a science.
Joe Mansueto

[In August 2008] What is a stock fund but a collection of stocks? To understand funds, you really need to know stocks.
Joe Mansueto



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