FactSet Research Systems sells the workstation an equity analyst opens each morning: data, models, screens and order workflows, billed per seat at roughly $12,000 to $24,000 a year. That is comfortably below a Bloomberg Terminal's roughly $32,000 per user, and it is precisely the product a competent AI research assistant is supposed to render unnecessary. That fear drove the Norwalk, Connecticut company's shares to multi-year lows earlier this year.

The disclosures point the other way. Organic annual subscription value — the contracted run-rate, the only clean demand measure for a business billed in seats — reached $2.49bn at 31 May, up 7.1%, the fifth consecutive quarter in which that growth rate accelerated. Retention held above 95%, and enterprise renewals lengthened by 30% on average in the quarter. Users and clients rose rather than shrank: 241,352 users at the end of February, a net 1,489 more in three months, plus 98 net new clients. Management raised the fiscal 2026 subscription-value target on 31 March, to $130-160m of net additions from $100-150m, and reaffirmed it on 1 July.

The bill arrives on the margin line

What FactSet is not doing is converting that demand into profit. Quarterly revenue grew 6.4% to $622.9m; operating income fell 14.3%. Operating margin went from 33.2% to 26.7% and gross margin from 52.1% to 49.9%, the arithmetic of embedding AI features into a product whose price per seat cannot rise as fast as the cost of running it. More than 90% of FactSet's fifty largest clients now use four or more of its AI products — adoption that shows up in the subscription line and in the cost line, not yet in earnings.

The shares have repaired about half the de-rating. Against consensus fiscal 2026 earnings of $17.79 a share, FactSet traded at 21.0x a year ago, 11.9x at its 15 May low and 16.9x now — still a fifth below where it started. Consensus models 6.5% revenue growth this year, below the organic subscription growth just reported, an unusual position for a company the market has been treating as structurally impaired. The average sell-side target has been cut toward $305 even as the stock rose to $301.59; Jefferies lifted its target to $253 and kept a Hold.

The one with the best numbers fell

MSCI licenses the benchmarks that index funds are built on, so it is paid a fee on assets, not on analysts. Its asset-based fee run rate hit a record $948m, up 25%, on roughly $40bn of second-quarter ETF inflows and $2.8trn of ETF assets tracking its indices. Revenue grew 12.2% to $867m at a 56.2% operating margin — the strongest of the three by both measures. The shares fell 10.1% in the 21 July session anyway, because the company raised its full-year expense guidance to $1,340-1,370m from $1,305-1,335m for the First Street acquisition and incentive pay. That single day is the entire month's decline. The result is a stock unchanged over twelve months on a forward multiple of 28.8x, identical to a year ago, while consensus 2026 earnings for it rose about 14% — a full year of growth accruing to the holder as nothing. Trailing, 31x compares with a ten-year average near 41.6x. The soft spot is sustainability data, where management guided net new sales to roughly zero for two quarters; private-assets subscriptions are growing past 16%.

Morningstar, the smallest at $8.0bn, is the one whose improvement is real and whose source is misread. Revenue rose 9.6% to $663.2m and operating margin widened from 20.7% to 24.2%. But Morningstar Credit — the DBRS ratings business — grew 23.4% to $104.9m on structured-finance issuance and supplied about a third of all revenue growth from a sixth of revenue, while PitchBook, its seat-billed private-markets platform, grew 4.9% amid corporate churn. The fastest-improving investment-data company is being carried by the debt-issuance cycle.

What the month actually was

Morningstar's 24% month is one gap: the sessions spanning its 28 July results moved the stock 16.4%, and stripping that plus its next-best day leaves about 2%. FactSet's is not — it round-tripped a July spike, then built 14.6% through August, and even without its two best August sessions retains roughly 4% of drift. On 19 August, when FactSet gained 5.7% with no company news beyond a routine $1.16 dividend, thirty-year Treasury yields fell 10 basis points to 5.18% and the S&P 500 rose 0.4%. That is multiple repair on a long-duration subscription stream, not a fresh disclosure.

Underneath all three, the industry pool is still growing: global spending on financial market data rose 6.5% to a record $49.2bn in 2025, with AI integration cited as a driver of demand rather than a substitute for it.

The setup

Where it stands — FactSet's subscription growth is accelerating while its margin compresses; MSCI's numbers are the group's best and its shares the worst. Would confirm — FactSet's fiscal fourth-quarter organic subscription value growth prints at or above 7.1% in September. Would invalidate — Adjusted operating margin lands below the reaffirmed 34-35.5% range, or client and user counts turn negative. Watch next — FactSet reports fiscal fourth-quarter and full-year results in late September; MSCI reports third-quarter results in October. Valuation — FactSet 19.5x trailing and 16.9x forward, against 21.0x on the same estimate a year ago and 11.9x in May.