Please stay tuned for important disclosure information at the conclusion of this episode.

Hi and welcome to the Longview. I'm Amy Aronaut, portfolio strategist for Morning Star,

and I'm Christine Ben's Director of Personal Finance and Retirement Planning for Morning Star.

Our guest on the podcast today is Don Phillips. Don is a managing director for Morningstar. He joined the company

in 1986 as its first mutual fund analyst and soon became editor of the flagship print

publication Morning Star Mutual Funds, establishing the editorial voice for which the company is best

known. He helped to develop the Morningstar

Style Box, the Morning Star rating, and other distinctive proprietary Morning Star innovations

that have become industry standards. Don has served in a variety of leadership roles at Morning

Star, most recently head of global research, before pairing back his schedule to take on a part-time non-management role.

He holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Texas and a master's degree from the University of Chicago.

Don, welcome to the Longview.

Thank you. It's great to be back.

It's great to have you here. A lot of our listeners are probably familiar with the Phillips Curve column.

You write for Morning Star magazine every quarter.

How do you come up with ideas for the column?

For me, everything starts with what are the issues and challenges that investors are facing?

And then I come back and think, what can I contribute or what can

Morningstar contribute to help encourage better outcomes for investors. So that's really the playbook.

It's been the playbook from day one at Morning Star and the things that we write, the tools

that we come up with, and now it sort of, I guess, carries on to some degree in my column.

When we had a going away lunch for John Recontaller, his retirement, he described himself as a 50,000-foot-view thinker, and he said you were a hundred thousand-foot-few thinker.

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