When Boring Becomes Beautiful
Every investor has those names they look at during chaotic weeks — the ones you could own, forget, and come back years later to find them quietly compounding like nothing ever happened. For me (and probably for many others), two of those names are MSCI and S&P Global. The giants behind the numbers, the indexes, and the ratings. The invisible backbone of the market that doesn’t just move with it, it fuels it. MSCI and S&P Global have practically insurmountable moats, deeply embedded across markets and protected by laws and regulations. Hands down (quote me on that in 50 years), nobody is replacing those two as long as the U.S. remains capitalist.
I currently hold both, but honestly, you could sleep well with either. They don’t give each other much. S&P Global has slightly more diversity, MSCI a bit more growth. I own both because they build an anchor for my portfolio, together with other anti-cyclical, defensive names like UnitedHealth or Equifax. All those companies are still growing organically, which is why I bought into them, but what really differentiates them is their competitive position. MSCI and S&P Global aren’t necessarily about excitement or daily headlines; they’re about consistency, scale, and one of the strongest moats you’ll ever find. You can think of them as the paid infrastructure on Wall Street: every trade, every fund benchmark, every ETF launch pays them something. That’s a business model nobody can deny.
Still, the question stands: are they safe havens with upside, or just glorified savings accounts?
If you haven’t got the impression yet, I believe they are the former. Yes, they provide unparalleled safety compared to other stocks, but upside potential is real. Let’s start with what they share. Both have margins most CEOs can only dream about (operating in the 50–60% range) and recurring revenues that barely flinch even when markets crash. Both benefit from the same structural tailwinds: the unstoppable rise of passive investing, global standardization of data, and the growing demand for transparent ESG frameworks. In short, they profit from the existence of investing itself. As long as people buy stocks, these two get paid. Even in bad times, when people opt for index funds over stock-picking, there are no bigger winners than these two silent compounders.
Let’s get on with the differences. S&P Global is broader, spanning data, analytics, indices, and the all-important credit ratings business that has been printing cash for decades. It’s the more diversified of the two — a little less volatile, a little slower, but also a little less cyclical given its exposure to so many areas. MSCI, on the other hand, is the purer “index and data” play. It rides the ETF and passive investing wave directly. If you believe that trend is still intact (and I do), MSCI is arguably the more direct winner. But it’s also more concentrated on one trend, even though it’s a big one.
In the current environment, with the Fear & Greed Index below 25, valuations painfully stretched, and Trump’s brain farts moving markets by the minute, I find myself gravitating toward companies where I can actually sleep. The “all-time high” market levels make adding risk feel wrong, but MSCI and S&P Global aren’t exactly risky plays. They’re the definition of resilient — companies that don’t just survive downturns but sometimes even benefit from them, as volatility spikes demand for data, research, and analytics. If markets crash, they might lose 10%, but honestly, who cares? Just buy more, and once you are confident enough in the future, rotate into more aggressive stocks. But let me stress again: both these names are likely to outperform the market anyway. Maybe not hyper-growth AI start-ups, but as quiet compounders capitalizing on secular trends, I wouldn’t count them out, even in a perma-bull market.
So, am I adding? Yes. I’m considering making both of them my absolute core — the kind of anchor you can build around when everything else starts wobbling. S&P Global is already my largest position, with a weighting around 7%, MSCI roughly half that. But as times become more uncertain, and markets continue to run as if nothing ever happened, I seriously consider rotating further into these fortresses.
