The firm cut its teeth in investment banking and institutional trading, where it maintains a strong presence today, but generates the lion share of its income from wealth and asset management franchises, where it boasted $9.3 trillion in client assets at the end of 2025. After reincorporation as a bank holding company in the wake of the global financial crisis, Morgan Stanley also boasts a top 10 banking franchise by deposits, with more than $400 billion in customer deposits, predominately attributable to cash sweeps from its wealth management and brokerage businesses.
We grade stocks based on past performance, their future growth potential, intrinsic value, dividend history, and overall financial health.
The chart below shows how we grade Morgan Stanley (MS) across the board compared to its closest peers.
Benzinga Edge stock rankings give you four critical scores to help you identify the strongest and weakest stocks to buy and sell.
70.43
Growth measures a stock's combined historical expansion in earnings and revenue across multiple time periods, with emphasis on both long-term trends and recent performance.
87.54
Momentum measures a stock's relative strength based on its price movement patterns and volatility over multiple timeframes, ranked as a percentile against other stocks.
31.33
Quality is a composite ranking that evaluates a company's operational efficiency and financial health by analyzing historical profitability metrics and fundamental strength indicators on a percentile basis relative to peers.
See how Morgan Stanley compares to its peers in these key performance metrics from Benzinga Rankings.
Below, you can see that analysts are estimating a 12-month price target range of $190.00 - $230.00 with an average of $207.22
Recent Ratings for Morgan Stanley (MS)
Earnings History (3 years)
It is important to look at a companies earnings history to see not only if they are profitable, but if their earnings are growing.Ideally, we would like to see a company have a long history of consistently high dividend payouts that have grown at a consistent rate. From here we want to be confident that this sort of dividend growth and consistency will persist into the future.
The chart below shows the historical trend in Morgan Stanley (MS) dividend yield on an annual basis.
The two main factors that we consider when analyzing past performance is overall return and volatility
Using these two metrics, we can determine if this stock gave its investors enough return for the risk that they took on by owning it. This is measured by the sharpe ratio, which has been used as a primary measure of risk/reward trade-off for almost 60 years.
This ratio can be interpreted as the amount of return an investor has received for the amount of risk that they took on by owning the stock over that timeframe.
Morgan Stanley (MS) sharpe ratio over the past 5 years is 1.4585 which is considered to be above average compared to the peer average of 0.9499
Based on our data, MS's options trades have recently carried more negative sentiment than positive.
The main purpose of an income statement is to convey details of profitability and business activities. Below, is MS's income statement for the previous four years along with its trailing-twelve- month profit & loss.
It breaks down what company owns (assets) and what a company owes (liabilities), in order to give investors an overview of its capital structure.
