Morningstar Buys CRSP Equity Database for $375 Million

Morningstar has announced its agreement to acquire the Center for Research in Security Prices (CRSP) from the University of Chicago for $375 million, a deal that will elevate Morningstar’s standing among global index providers. CRSP is a respected name in the indexing industry, known for its comprehensive historical stock market data and widely used benchmarks. Today, CRSP indices serve as the foundation for more than $3 trillion in investment funds, most prominently the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund, which manages roughly $2 trillion in assets. Vanguard’s decision over a decade ago to shift from larger index brands to CRSP’s lower-cost alternatives gave the firm significant scale and influence.

For Morningstar, traditionally recognized for its mutual fund ratings and investment analysis, the acquisition represents a major strategic step in broadening its business beyond research. It follows recent expansions into areas such as private markets, ESG research, and credit ratings. By incorporating CRSP’s indexing methodologies and trusted data processes, Morningstar aims to deliver a more complete suite of tools to asset managers, advisors, and platforms. For wealth management professionals, the deal highlights the growing importance of cost-efficient, data-driven benchmarks in supporting investment decisions and long-term client outcomes.

Knote-------

Everyone seems to be focused on the indexing here, and I believe that is one of Morningstar's goals. CRSP is a major index provider, but not as major as $3 trillion might suggest because most of that is just one client, Vanguard. Still, it gives them a good base and they do have a good brand, so if they can manage to muzzle their pricing policies a bit, they could win people over. But, even without the index angle, I will point out that just being able to pull quality mutual fund, ETF, and equity data all in one API call is pretty compelling and now hopefully imminent.

I've used CRSP data in the past and it is an absolute pleasure to work with. It is, in my opinion, the cleanest data set out there. It does an excellent job where other providers sometimes stumble: history back to 1926, cleanest historical total return indexes out there (necessary for any sort of real historical analysis or index building), and the most extensive data on dead companies (you can't build an index without this or it will have survivor bias). The only problem is that it is narrow and only really focuses on US stocks. This may not matter much to Morningstar at the moment given their heavy US footprint, but it would be nice to see them compliment it with something like Compustat. I'm not going to get my hopes up about that since it is owned by S&P.

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