Morningstar’s Benz: My journey from copy editor to fund analyst

Most of my colleagues have a voracious appetite for anything related to business or investments. Morningstar’s first mutual fund analyst and current managing director Don Phillips sunk his paper-route money into a mutual fund, compelled by the notion that Sir John Templeton could be his own money manager. Another coworker says he couldn’t wait for BusinessWeek to hit his mailbox on Saturdays when he was in junior high.

Me? Not so much. My father was an avid investor, in both individual stocks and later on in mutual funds. But I’m sad to say I chalked up his avocation as just another one of his boring hobbies, like the computers he was constantly tinkering with in his basement office or his odd collection of wheat germ and other inedible health-store items in the kitchen cabinet. I suppose I was grateful that my parents seemed to pay for everything from college to cars to weddings without any fuss or discussion, but I never bothered to ask how they did it.

Instead, as a 20-something seeking jobs in the publishing industry in the early 1990s, I’ll confess that I wasn’t just disinterested in investing — I was mildly disdainful of the whole pursuit. My vision of the field was (admittedly poorly) informed by the investing icons of the 1980s — real and fictional characters like Ivan Boesky, Michael Milken and Gordon Gekko, grotesque in their excess.

While my dad had put the bug in my ear to apply for a job at Morningstar because he liked its mutual fund reports, my main attraction to the company wasn’t investing at all. Rather, I fell in love with its culture. The firm was young and growing like a weed. Most employees hailed from liberal arts backgrounds like me, and I met people with even cooler CD collections than my own. Miraculously, there were no official office hours or vacation policy, but everyone seemed to be working late, weekends, whatever it took. It felt entrepreneurial and alive.

After a short while, I realized the motivating force behind the place was a mission everyone genuinely believed in: to help investors reach their financial goals. Mutual funds were one of the great equalizers of the financial services industry, giving even small investors access to highly diversified portfolios and world-class money managers. Joe Mansueto, our founder and CEO, created Morningstar to help light the way for all of those newly empowered investors, to help them choose Fidelity Contrafund over the fund with a 4% expense ratio.

Armed with that knowledge, it wasn’t such a leap for me to believe in that mission, too. Although one of my colleagues actually did receive a letter from Ivan Boesky (he subscribed to our old closed-end publication), I soon realized that many of our customers were middle-class folks reading our publications in the public library. Just like my parents, they were trying to figure out investing so that they could send their kids to college, buy cars and pay for weddings.

After starting as a copy editor, I quickly set my sights on becoming a mutual fund analyst, so I could actually research and write some of the reports that I was editing. It was initially a tough sell to get the analysts and editors to consider me a potential peer. But I was able to do so in stealth mode, by showing them, through my edits, what I had absorbed along the way. If a fund report stated that utilities had fallen in 1995, I’d suggest to the analyst that perhaps he meant 1994. I’m sure I was an annoying show-off, but I made my point. I was learning this stuff. I got the job.

In my early days as an analyst, I struggled with saying negative things about fund managers. Perhaps even more than most humans, I like to be liked. Over time, though, I gained confidence in stating my opinions, even unfavorable ones. I learned the greatest compliment a fund manager could pay me was to say, “I didn’t necessarily like your analysis of my fund, but I thought it was fair.” After several years in the trenches, I eventually led our team of U.S. equity fund analysts, then the entire mutual fund analyst team. I’ve served as editor at some of our publications, such as Morningstar FundInvestor and Morningstar Mutual Funds, and have had the opportunity to write some of Morningstar’s books, too.

Morningstar’s mission of serving and empowering investors motivated my segue into my current position as director of personal finance. I still believe in individual security research, but this role allows me to help investors with some of the broader challenges that can make or break their financial plans — setting asset allocations and extracting cash from their portfolios during retirement, for example. I’m always tickled when readers tell me that my guidance helped them reach a financial goal, or, just as important, helped them worry less about money. I knew I had lucked into a good job when the author Bill Bernstein, who I admire thoroughly, told me I have the best job at Morningstar. I couldn’t agree more.

Christine Benz is director of personal finance at Morningstar Inc.