< The 2014 All-America Research TeamKrishna Guha & teamISI GroupFirst-place appearances: 11

Total appearances: 15

Team debut: 1999After a year’s absence from this lineup, ISI Group returns to claim second place. The three-member team is now under the direction of Krishna Guha, who joined the firm last year to take the reins after Andrew Laperriere decamped to co-found his own shop, Cornerstone Macro. Guha previously served for three years as head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s communications group, and clients believe that experience gives his ISI squad an edge. “Having worked at the Fed,” one client attests, “he knows the place inside and out. He knows how Janet Yellen thinks, and he understands where policy is going.” Guha and his colleagues project that under Fed chair Yellen, the central bank “will be careful and patient,” says the crew chief. However, he notes, a stronger U.S. recovery will ratchet up “U.S. rate expectations” and boost the strength of the dollar — which they “view as the natural beneficiary of sustained elevated geopolitical risk.” Looking abroad, Guha cautions that although the European Central Bank is actively engineering depreciation of the euro “via rate differentials, if this fails, the ECB will likely be forced into quantitative easing.” Against this backdrop, the ISI researchers “are long on the dollar, short on the euro,” he says, and recommend that investors short fed funds rate futures ending in 2016 rather than in 2015, “because we think the Fed will err in the direction of being late” with tight money policies. Finally, the strategists also advise shorting Eurodollar contracts as a way to “bet on higher rates” across the pond.