< The 2014 All-America Research Team

Total Appearances: 16

Analyst Debut: 1999All-America Research Team Hall of Famer Meredith Adler has been investors’ favorite U.S. food and drug chains retailing analyst since 2002. The 60-year-old Barclays researcher “has a wealth of experience,” one admirer acknowledges, “and is able to connect the dots between all the various players. She is an important call to make when trying to determine which way the ever-changing winds are blowing.” Adler reports that most of the companies in her sector have been suffering the knock-on effects of consumer budgets’ being strapped. Indeed, although the shares climbed 4 percent year to date through mid-September, they lagged the broad U.S. market by 3.3 percentage points. One of the retailers that has been experiencing a slowdown in top-line growth as a result of the pulled-back in discretionary spending, she advises, is Sally Beauty Holdings, a distributor of personal care products that is headquartered in Denton, Texas. Given this environment, she downgraded Sally from buy to neutral in May 2013. Sure enough, by the middle of last month, the stock had slid 7.3 percent, to $27.80, trailing its peers by 22.5 percentage points.