Moat
9.0/10
Moody's combines regulatory recognition, issuer-paid ratings workflows, investor reliance, proprietary research, and enterprise analytics subscriptions, making displacement difficult even where open analytics tools improve.
MCOQueued from the May 25, 2026 S&P 500 market-cap snapshot ranks 126-150.
Moody's Corporation
Moody's Corporation provides credit ratings, risk analytics, research, data, and financial intelligence services.
Metadata
Where this company sits
- Ticker
- MCO
- Rank snapshot
- ≈ 147
- Sector
- Financials
- Industry
- Financial Exchanges & Data
- Region
- United States
- Index
- S&P 500 · Top 150 by market cap
Metrics
Scoring view
Every metric is paired with a short rationale. The numbers are deliberate, not divine.
Decentralizability
4.0/10
Risk analytics, data integration, and modeling workflows have credible open-source substitutes, but official credit ratings depend heavily on institutional trust, regulation, legal accountability, and market convention.
Profitability
9.0/10
Recent financial summaries for fiscal 2025 show about $7.7 billion of revenue, roughly $3.35 billion of operating income, and about $2.46 billion of net income, indicating very high margins for an information and analytics company.
Price / Earnings
32.1x
Market-data snapshot reported a trailing P/E near 32.1 as of April 12, 2026; this is market-sensitive and should be refreshed before publication if valuation precision matters.
Market cap
$81.4B
Trading Economics reported Moody's market capitalization at about $81.43 billion in May 2026; other current market-data pages around the same period showed roughly $78 billion to $81 billion.
Freed-up capital potential
$8.1B
Derived from market cap, moat resistance, decentralizability, and profitability. It is a directional estimate of value capture that could come under pressure if open alternatives compound.
Narrative
Why the company matters
A short editorial overview plus the current thesis on moat strength and decentralization pressure.
Business mix
Moody's operates through Moody's Ratings, which publishes credit ratings and research across debt markets, and Moody's Analytics, which sells data, software, models, and workflow tools for risk, finance, and compliance users.
The company benefits from regulated-market recognition, long issuer and investor relationships, proprietary datasets, and deeply embedded enterprise workflows.
Registry relevance
Moody's is a useful Free The World case because its moat sits at the boundary between reputation, regulation, data scale, and financial workflow lock-in.
Open financial data, transparent models, open-source risk engines, and federated attestations can pressure parts of the analytics stack, but replacing nationally recognized rating-agency status is much harder.
Moat reading
Moody's moat is high because credit ratings are not only information products; they are embedded in issuance workflows, investor mandates, regulation, and decades of market convention. Issuers pay for ratings because capital markets expect recognizable agency opinions, and investors consume the research because those opinions remain part of the shared language of credit markets.
Moody's Analytics adds a second moat through proprietary datasets, models, software, and institutional integration. Its revenue base is supported by recurring subscriptions and workflow dependence rather than one-off content sales.
Decentralization reading
The analytics side is meaningfully more decentralizable than the official ratings franchise. Open-source quantitative libraries, open identifiers, public filings, and open financial research platforms can replicate portions of risk modeling, screening, and portfolio analytics.
The ratings side is less decentralizable because a usable substitute must solve governance, liability, conflict-of-interest, data quality, surveillance, and market-recognition problems at once. Federated or community-run systems can create pressure and niche alternatives, but broad bond-market substitution would require institutional trust that open tooling alone does not provide.
Products
Where the moat actually touches users
These pages zoom into the products and services that matter most to each company, the alternatives already nibbling at them, and 3 structured disruption concepts across the current product set.
3 disruption concepts tracked0 documented exceptions
Moody's Ratings
Credit ratings and research
1 conceptMoody's Ratings publishes credit ratings, research, and opinions used by issuers, investors, and market participants across global debt markets.
Moody's Analytics
Risk analytics, data, and financial intelligence software
2 conceptsMoody's Analytics provides credit risk, economic forecasting, data, modeling, and workflow tools for financial institutions, corporations, and public-sector users.
Technology waves
Strategic lenses
These are the repo's explicit bias terms: the technologies expected to keep making incumbents less inevitable over time.
Bitcoin and Lightning as coordination rails
Proof-of-work economics, programmable payment flows, and anti-spam pricing make more digital systems capable of rewarding signal while resisting abuse.
- • Platforms that monetize gatekeeping could face pressure from protocol-native payment and reputation layers.
- • Micropayments can replace some ad-funded or subscription-heavy distribution models.
- • Open systems with credible anti-spam economics deserve a higher decentralizability score than legacy software assumptions suggest.
Paper trail
Visible evidence trail
These sources shaped the scoring and writing. The site is opinionated, but it should not behave like it is improvising facts in a dark room.
Moody's Corporation 2025 Annual Report
Moody's Corporation / SEC · annual report
Primary annual filing for business segments, risk factors, revenue, profitability, and company description.
Reviewed 2026-05-29
About Moody's
Moody's Corporation · investor relations
Company overview source for Moody's role in ratings, data, research, analytics, and decision intelligence.
Reviewed 2026-05-29
Credit Risk Solutions & Management
Moody's · product page
Product source describing Moody's credit risk research, data, analytics, consumer credit, scenarios, modeling, and scoring capabilities.
Reviewed 2026-05-29
Moody's Corp. Market Cap and Key Stats
GoMarketCap · market data
Market-data snapshot for rank approximation, market capitalization, revenue, net income, and P/E ratio.
Reviewed 2026-05-29
Moody's Market Capitalization
Trading Economics · market data
Current May 2026 market capitalization reference used for the registry market-cap metric.
Reviewed 2026-05-29