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Yin Luo
Deutsche Bank Securities
First-place appearances: 3

Total appearances: 3

Analyst debut: 2011

Yin Luo of Deutsche Bank Securities scores a third straight top finish. The 38-year-old strategist’s wonkish style and prodigious output make him something of a “quant’s quant,” as one proponent says. Luo has been highlighting investors’ adoption of alternative-beta strategies. Clients increasingly recognize that returns from active portfolio management, or traditional alpha, can largely be reproduced by means of indexing that captures systematic risk premiums, or beta. For example, value investing, Luo explains, can be replicated by overweighting stocks with attractive valuations while underweighting more-expensive stocks. “The performance of such a strategy is highly correlated with those of most actively managed value funds, while the cost of building such an index tends to be much cheaper,” he says. “By recognizing that value is simply an ‘alternative’ form of beta, investors can harvest the value risk premium by investing in a value index without paying active-management fees.” Luo expects such alternative-beta strategies to grow in popularity into next year. The strategist “keeps investors up to speed with the latest thinking in the field. He’s always on the front end of the curve with the latest ideas that are percolating out there.” — Paul Sweeney