After a scathing report in the Wall Street Journal found that Morningstar’s star ratings were not predictive of mutual fund performance, the company defended its methods and research in a series of online posts.

On Thursday, Jeffrey Ptak, Morningstar’s head of global manager research, argued that the star rating does have some moderate predictive power and that the Journal’s analysis was flawed and misleading. This followed a message on Wednesday from the company’s CEO, Kunal Kapoor, defending the Chicago-based investment research company’s independence and transparency, and countering the Journal’s research.

“We strongly disagree with the conclusions it reached about the efficacy of our ratings,” wrote Kapoor. “We have responded to the Journal to request corrections to numerous points that mischaracterize our business.”

Kicking off the controversy was “The Morningstar Mirage,” a piece published Wednesday morning after a year-long study of the company’s ratings by the newspaper. The research tested the performance of thousands of mutual funds rated by Morningstar since 2003.

Morningstar rates funds from one to five stars, with five stars being the best of the best. The Wall Street Journal’s report, however, found that five-star funds failed to sustain their performance. After achieving a five-star rating, only 12 percent of funds did well enough through the next five years to retain their status, while 10 percent of five-star funds fell to the one-star rating, the newspaper reported.

“Funds that earned high star ratings attracted the vast majority of investor dollars. Most of them failed to perform,” the Journal reported.

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