Max Warburton & team Sanford C. Bernstein
The buy side says: “I consider Max to be one of the very best analysts in Europe.”
Max Warburton led the UBS team to No. 1 in 2007 and 2008; he moved to Sanford C. Bernstein in 2008 and last year captained that firm’s two-member team to second place. (The firm did not rank in 2009; Warburton did not begin publishing until the fall of 2008, after polling for the 2009 survey had begun.) This year, Warburton returns to the winner’s circle. Investors praise the 36-year-old analyst’s willingness “to go against consensus or company management when he has conviction in a call,” as one portfolio manager puts it. Case in point: The team urged clients to buy shares of Daimler, the German auto manufacturer whose brands include the Mercedes-Benz line, in September 2009, on the belief that Mercedes profits would be strong despite what the researchers considered “weirdly cautious guidance” from management. Through December 2010 the stock had sped from €33.78 to €50.73, a 50.2 percent gain that eclipsed the sector by 7.4 percentage points.
