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Lourens Pirenc
& team
Morgan Stanley
"Terrific depth and breadth of knowledge."
Rocketing from runner-up all the way to first place is Morgan Stanley’s troupe of 25 under the direction of Sydney-based Lourens Pirenc, 40. The analysts report on some 160 companies and win praise for “independence and agility of mind,” as one money manager puts it. In mid-March they downgraded real estate investment trusts from market perform to cautious, primarily on valuation. The sole exception: Charter Hall Retail REIT, which they upgraded from underweight to overweight as a bargain, at A$3.95, on the Sydney-based commercial property manager’s consistent rental growth. By the end of the following month, the stock had zipped to A$4.29, gaining 8.6 percent and besting Australia’s broad market by 6.3 percentage points. Pirenc earned a bachelor’s degree in hospitality administration from Netherlands’ Hotelschool Den Haag and MBAs in hospitality management from both France’s Ecole Supérieure des Sciences Economiques et Commerciales and New York’s Cornell University. He worked in the London offices of Credit Suisse — and co-captained that firm’s top-ranked team in European Leisure & Hotels in 2002 — before moving to Morgan Stanley that same year. Pirenc relocated to Sydney in 2007 to direct coverage of Australian equities research. — Ben Mattlin