Sherif Hamid, Søren Willemann & team
Barclays
Newcomers Sherif Hamid and Søren Willemann guide their Barclays trio to its first appearance in the ranking, at No. 3; Hamid, who is based in New York, also co-leads (with Neil Seyffert) a runner-up team in High-Yield Strategy. Credit rallied strongly last year: The iTraxx Main index finished 2012 with a 30 percent drop in spread — albeit with much volatility along the way — and this year is “unlikely to provide anywhere near as much directional upside,” says Willemann, who works out of London. Declining correlation, among individual names as well as indexes, is likely to continue, marking a more pronounced shift toward relative-value trading, he adds. The strategists are recommending that clients include single-name credit default swap curve flatteners as hedges, trade a basket of tight names inside an index against the index itself and trade payer or receiver options on one index against options on another. One portfolio manager hails the team’s “mastery of the broad picture and the intricacy of its technical research.” — Carolyn Koo


Runners-up
Ioannis Angelakis, Barnaby Martin & team Bank of America Merrill Lynch
Paola Lamedica & team BNP Paribas Securities Sivan Mahadevan, Phanikiran Naraparaju & team Morgan Stanley