Jamie Rollo & team, Morgan Stanley

The buy side says: “Their analysis is brilliant and insightful.”

For a seventh straight year — and for the eighth time in ten years — Jamie Rollo guides ­Morgan Stanley’s London-­based team of four to the top. Rollo, 39, “leads easily one of the best teams in leisure research,” confirms one investor. The crew brought two more companies under its purview last year — increasing its total to 27 — and clients say the analysts’ research on those stocks benefits greatly from Rollo’s 12 years spent following the space. “That experience is worth something in a cyclical sector,” observes one ally. ­Rollo’s background has also taught him that in contexts like Europe’s current volatile economic climate, market-­cycle insights are of limited value: “We are trying not to make recommendations that depend on macro views, as this is so uncertain,” he says. Instead, the researchers are looking for “long-term structural outperformers,” which they believe they’ve found in such U.K.-based companies as ­Compass Group, a food services management concern, and InterContinental Hotels Group. These stocks beat the broad market by 17.4 and 5.3 percentage points, respectively, last year.