Dear Friends,

I hope you are healthy and close to home. We are entering uncharted waters with the COVID-19 outbreak, and it appears the uncertainty will persist longer than many had hoped just a few days ago.

Our first priority has been to ensure the health and safety of our people, and I believe the Morningstar team is well prepared and supported to manage through this health threat. We are also committed to ensuring that we maintain business continuity and 100 per cent operational integrity. You should expect no disruption of service.

We are adapting our work to support the intensely increasing needs of investors during this period with research and fact-based insights into the economic and financial impact of COVID-19. Many investors today have never experienced a bear market in their personal investing and many more hadn’t accumulated significant wealth of their own during the last downturn. The same is true for many professional investors who either have never experienced this type of market environment or did not have as much professional financial responsibility during it. This is a challenging environment for the experienced and even more unsettling for the inexperienced.

Morningstar’s mission is to empower investor success, and we are committed to weathering this storm with all investors. We are confident that with a sustained focus on long-term investing principles, investors will manage through this crisis just fine. I encourage you to read and share our commentary on Morningstar.com.au. Our coverage remains calm and research based, and we have made some design and format changes to streamline access to our authors and content analysing the effects of this outbreak. A couple of specific suggestions for you in the interim include:

I also invite you to watch the recording of our full company-wide work-from-home internal town hall with a panel of researchers discussing the potential outcomes.

Finally, Morningstar has a large workforce in China and offices in Japan, South Korea, Italy and Washington State, primary areas where COVID-19 first hit hardest. We began organising our response to the outbreak in early January and have been scaling the operation up as the virus spread globally. We have improved our response with each regional outbreak, and building on those learnings is incredibly valuable. I share this with you because there has been a common pattern of resilience and innovation I have observed from each of these countries, our teams, and their communities. It has been inspiring, and I am confident we will endure.

Thank you for your partnership.

Be well,
Kunal