Christopher Hogbin & team, Sanford C. Bernstein

The buy side says: “They tune out the noise and focus on the long term.”

The Sanford C. Bernstein group led by ­Christopher ­Hogbin repeats in first place. The three members of the team, all of whom work out of ­London, cover Europe’s seven largest food retailers. Hogbin, 37, believes the sector is attractively valued and is trading at a small premium to the broad market, but he is cautioning clients to keep a close watch on how these companies “cope in what we expect will remain a tough macroeconomic environment, especially as food inflation subsides,” he says. The team has buy ratings on Dutch supermarket chain Royal Ahold and U.K.-based supermarket operator Tesco, on the belief that most investors have not fully appreciated the companies’ earnings growth potential; those stocks outperformed Europe’s broad market by 20.8 and 7.1 percentage points, respectively, last year. One buy-­sider says that in addition to the analysts’ solid research, he admires how Hogbin interacts with company executives: “I like the way he asks questions to management — even classic questions are asked in a way that enables an optimized answer.”