Yankun Hou Nomura

The buy side says: “He has a really good grasp of heavy industrials.”

Unranked in this sector last year, Yankun Hou shoots straight to the top spot; the Nomura analyst is also No. 1 in ­Consumer/Discretionary, for a second consecutive year. In July, Hou, 40, told investors that China’s aggressive expansion of its high-speed rail lines would benefit railroad-­equipment manufacturers, and among the stocks he recommended was Zhuzhou CSR Times Electric Co., at HK$18.60. Shares of the company, which is headquartered in Zhuzhou, Hunan, had raced to HK$30.75 by the end of April, a 65.3 percent advance that sped past the sector by 57.5 percentage points. “His understanding that the whole group would outperform the market was way ahead of everyone else,” cheers one buy-side loyalist. Hou earned an MBA from Ithaca, New York’s ­Johnson School at Cornell ­University in 2005 and then joined Lehman Brothers Asia as an auto-parts analyst; Nomura acquired Lehman’s Asian operations in 2008.