Morningstar, Inc., a provider of independent insights and index solutions, has launched the Morningstar PitchBook US Modern Market 100 Index. This new benchmark is designed to integrate public and private equity exposure within a single index, offering a unified framework for performance benchmarking and serving as a basis for investable products.
The Modern Market 100 aims to address a market gap where companies, particularly in technology-driven sectors like AI, biotech, and fintech, are raising substantial capital and remaining private for longer periods. This trend means that traditional public market indexes do not always capture the full scope of investor opportunities. By expanding equity market exposure to include late-stage venture-capital-backed companies, the index seeks to enhance diversification and unlock growth potential in innovative segments not fully represented in public markets alone.
Comprising 100 of the largest US companies, the index blends 90 publicly listed firms with 10 significant venture-capital-backed private leaders, including SpaceX, OpenAI, and Stripe. To accurately reflect the relative sizes of the public and private equity markets, the index allocates 90% to public companies and 10% to private firms. The index is built for investability, featuring transparent pricing, liquidity screens, and quarterly rebalances, with daily calculations. Prices for venture-capital-backed companies are derived from verified secondary market transactions, while public company prices are based on official exchange closes.
Ron Bundy, President of Morningstar Indexes, stated, “As private investments make their way into more investor portfolios, investors need better data and relevant benchmarks to capture the modern opportunity set. Our new index empowers investors with a unified framework that reflects both public and private market leaders, so investors can evaluate public and private investments on the same level playing field.”
Joanna McGinley, EVP, Strategic Partnerships and Initiatives at PitchBook, a Morningstar company, commented, “PitchBook is uniquely positioned to help build this index because of the depth of our private market data and the research expertise we’ve developed over nearly two decades. Modern Market 100 brings together our proprietary insights into venture-backed companies with the transparency of public markets, offering an investable view of how today’s most important companies perform across the private-to-public lifecycle. We believe this index not only provides a valuable benchmarking tool but also advances the industry by helping investors better understand and navigate the convergence of private and public markets.”
The Modern Market 100 is the latest addition to Morningstar’s expanding suite of indexes that leverage PitchBook’s private market data and insights. This initiative underscores Morningstar’s commitment to developing next-generation companion indexes designed to provide investors with more precise tools, deeper insights, and improved methods for navigating an evolving market landscape.
