Five and a half years in, and the Jeffrey Gundlach-Morningstar feud is still going strong.

Kirsten Grind of the Wall Street Journal is the latest to highlight the bad blood between Gundlach's Los Angeles-based fixed income mutual fund shop, DoubleLine Capital [profile], on the one hand and Chicago-based mutual fund ratings titan Morningstar on the other. M* is slated to review Gundlach's flagship, $46.3-billion, five-star DoubleLine Total Return Bond Fund this week, the paper reports, yet unnamed sources say that M* analysts' "fact-checking calls and emails are going unanswered."

M* tells MFWire the DoubleLine fund is one of only two U.S. open-end funds, out of 1,068, that M* has given a "not-ratable" analyst rating in recent years. M* has also had 13 more funds outside the U.S. that have been designated not ratable in recent years. And the DoubleLine fund is the only fund in the U.S., and one of only eight worldwide, that is currently designated not ratable.

The feuds dates all the way back to the days before Gundlach created DoubleLine, at the end of 2009, and DoubleLine stopped talking to M*'s research analysts in 2012. The new WSJ article offers an update on the latest fallout, as well as a look at back at the history. 

Correction: A prior version of this story gave the wrong contextual numbers around Morningstar's "Not Ratable" designations.

Edited by: Neil Anderson, Managing Editor


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