Daniel Fineman & team Credit Suisse
The buy side says: “The team is fast in reacting to what is going on.”
With Daniel Fineman at the helm, Credit Suisse’s nine-member team in Bangkok rules the roost for a third year running. With one more analyst than last year and a burgeoning coverage universe that now numbers 49 companies, the researchers continue to win praise for their February 2010, valuation-based upgrade of LPN Development from neutral to outperform, at 5.71 baht. They reiterated the call in November 2011, at 9.73 baht, making the case that the massive flooding caused by Tropical Storm Nock-ten affected other homebuilders more than LPN, owing to the fact that most of the Bangkok-based real estate developer’s properties are high-rises. By the end of March, the stock had soared to 15.50 baht — an eye-popping 171.5 percent gain since the original upgrade that trounced Thailand’s broad market by 103.2 percentage points. (LPN remains one of the team’s top picks for 2012, with the property sector deemed among the fastest-growing.) In February 2011 the analysts upgraded Bangkok Bank from neutral to outperform, at 137.67 baht, citing rising interest rates, margin improvements and earnings momentum. Shares of the Bangkok-based financial services firm jumped 31.8 percent, to 181.48 baht, and bested the broad market by 3.3 percentage points, through March. Fineman holds a master’s degree in international history from the London School of Economics and Political Science, a master of arts and a master of philosophy in history from Yale University, and a Ph.D. in Southeast Asian history, which he also earned at Yale. The 49-year-old joined the firm in 2007 from the international bank supervision department of the U.S. Federal Reserve. He is hailed by one client for “outside-of-the-box thinking and analyses that go beyond fundamentals.” — Ben Mattlin
