Checklist for new subscribers

We encourage new Morningstar Investor subscribers to try this seven-step guide during their free trials—and beyond.

Don't have a subscription to Morningstar Investor yet? Start your free trial today.

1. Complete your onboarding checklist and catch a webinar.

As a new subscriber, you have access to a personalized onboarding checklist, accessible in the lower-right corner of your screen when you're logged into Morningstar.com. If you haven't already, take a tour and click through the checklist tasks to launch interactive guides that will help you quickly get up to speed on how to make the most of your subscription. Want more hands-on guidance? Register for an upcoming webinar.

2. Explore Screener to quickly find and evaluate securities.

When you use our powerful Screener tool, you can opt for one of our pre-filtered views, or create your own custom views to find securities that fit your risk tolerance and diversification needs—all while layering in Morningstar's exclusive stock and fund ratings and performance and valuation data.

If you'd rather draw inspiration from our analysts, try exploring Best Investments to review a curated selection of lists, including featured stocks, funds, and securities that fit a particular style or sector. From there, you can launch the screener to layer on additional criteria

3. Create a watchlist and stay updated with notifications.

Watchlists help you keep tabs on securities and indexes you don't currently own. You can customize them using our expansive performance and valuation metrics, so you can quickly pinpoint buy opportunities. Once you've set up at least one watchlist, we encourage you to use notifications (accessed via the bell icon) to view ratings and analysis updates specific to your portfolios and watchlists.

4. Add your investments to one or more portfolios.

You can use to monitor your accounts and create portfolios for each unique investing goal. Start by or from a financial institution. Manually adding your holdings gives you even deeper analysis of your investments. .

5. Study company reports and fund analyst reports.

Company reports (for stocks) and fund analyst reports (for mutual funds and ETFs) contain comprehensive data paired with a thorough evaluation of an investment’s merits and drawbacks. They're perfect for evaluating the value of a security over time and make excellent companions while screening.

Find them across Morningstar.com, including on stock and fund quote pages, and via your notifications feed.

6. Read Analyst Notes. 

Your Morningstar Investor subscription gives you exclusive access to our analysts’ take on the most decisive factors leading to the overall rating of a stock, fund, or ETF. Our analysts are committed to reporting on investments fairly, accurately, and from the investor’s point of view, offering objective insights you can trust. You can access the latest notes via company reports.

7. Track markets at a macro level.

Our refreshed Markets page is dedicated to market monitoring, with real-time trackers to help you zoom out for greater context as you evaluate investing opportunities.  You can also check out our market volatility explainer article that provides insight into how to leverage the Market Fair Value page to uncover undervalued securities.