Morningstar : Our answers on bonus expense, PitchBook, operating margin, Morningstar.com, and more.

Answer

We've been optimizingour new website for individual investors (available at http://beta.morningstar.com) based on user feedback and have plans to more aggressively ramp up the amount of traffic to the new site over the coming weeks, as we've addressed the major themes surfaced by site visitors and our own analytics.

On the beta site, we will also continue to build out our new managed products investment report, enhance our multimedia content with an expanded video center, and prototype some new experiences in our portfolio manager tool.

We are currently focusing the majority of our efforts on the new site. We also have a variety of product development efforts underway in other major markets globally, including Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom. In Australia, for example, we have embarked on an in-depth research project to understand how the needs of individual investors are
changing in Australia and how we can adapt our full suite of assets to meet those needs. Our aim is to be able to help a broader population of individual investors in Australia by helping to make investing more accessible.

More broadly, nearly all of our research innovations are available to individual investors. For example, in 2016, we introduced the new Morningstar Sustainability Rating for funds, which is available on Morningstar.com and several other products. In 2017, we are focusing on enhancing fixed-income data and analytics, which will allow individual investors and others to get a more accurate view of their portfolios.

Many of our other product offerings for financial advisors and asset managers ultimately serve individuals as well. For example, millions of individual investors have access to our online retirement advice and managed retirement accounts. Even though we sell these services to retirement plan sponsors and providers, individuals are the end user. Our Workplace product group essentially offers automated investment advice to individual investors, including 'robo advice' offered via managed retirement accounts.

We're also developing many tools for financial advisors that will ultimately benefit their clients, such as an enhanced risk tolerance questionnaire, new financial planning tools, and behavioral finance capabilities.