< The 2015 All-America Research Team

Total appearances: 24

Team debut: 1993

Barclays’s crew with Maneesh Deshpande, 47, Venu Krishna, 49, at the helm secures the No. 3 spot for a second consecutive year. The eight-strong group impresses clients with the range of its quality publications. “Their research on equity derivatives is very strong, and they do a good, consistent job with their regular periodic research,” one fund manager attests. “But what I really like is their one-off special reports, where they take up a topic and run with it.” Currently, the strategists view small-cap stocks as better positioned to benefit from an expected pickup in the domestic U.S. economy than large caps. Their outperformance, Krishna says, will be “driven by their higher level of capital spending, greater balance-sheet leverage, better fundamentals — both top line and bottom line — and incremental opportunity on margins.” At a company-specific level, they are recommending that investors snap up Cheniere Energy’s 4.25 percent convertible notes, which the Barclays analysts see as “a superior risk-adjusted vehicle to gain exposure to its stock and as a compelling alternative to the equity,” he says. Houston-based Cheniere operates liquefied-natural-gas export facilities. Among other things, the credits, due in 2045, “offer a defensive way to get exposure to LNG,” Krishna notes, and “provide income of 5.7 percent versus the common stock that pays no dividend.” Further, he adds, the convertibles “are higher up in the capital structure and have long-call protection.”