TacticScaleWhat Moody's Does & How It Makes Money (MCO)
Updated October 2026 · reflects Moody's's latest reported financials
Credit ratings agency and risk data, analytics, and software provider. Moody's Investors Service earns fees for rating debt obligations and the entities that issue them.
How Moody's makes money
Moody's Investors Service earns fees for rating debt obligations and the entities that issue them. Moody's Analytics sells subscriptions to research, data sets, models, and cloud-based SaaS software for risk management, lending, KYC, and insurance workflows.
What Moody's does
Moody's Corporation is an integrated risk assessment firm headquartered in New York and founded in 1900. It operates globally through two segments. Moody's Investors Service (MIS) publishes credit ratings and assessments on debt obligations and the entities that issue them, including corporates, financial institutions, governments, and structured finance securities. Moody's Analytics (MA) supplies risk management tools to institutional participants in financial markets. These include credit research, credit and economic models, company and securities data sets, and cloud-based SaaS solutions for banking, insurance, and know-your-customer workflows. Offerings also cover compliance and third-party risk, lending, balance sheet and capital management, and the Maxsight unified risk platform. Customers come from the financial, banking, insurance, corporate, public, and asset management sectors.
Products & services
- Moody's Investors Service credit ratings
- Moody's Analytics credit research and models
- Maxsight risk platform
- Know-your-customer and compliance solutions
- Lending origination and monitoring suite
- Insurance underwriting solutions
What is Moody's worth?
On an owner-earnings DCF, Moody's's most-likely value is about $567 versus a recent price near $464 (22% below fair value). But TacticScale only calls a stock undervalued when the price sits below its conservative no-growth floor (~$189) with a margin of safety — so the honest verdict here is “Fairly priced — no edge.” Fair value earns its keep only at the extremes, not in the wide middle.
Price sits in the normal range — fair value isn't actionable here; it earns its keep only when price drops below the no-growth floor, or runs to roughly double the optimistic case.
Analysis, not advice. Fair value is a margin-of-safety estimate from a deterministic owner-earnings DCF, not a price target or recommendation. See the full breakdown →
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