Bruce Harting  Barclays Capital

The buy side says: “Bruce has a great feel for the industry.”

At the summit for a seventh straight year, Barclays ­Capital’s Bruce Harting is revered for having “a wealth of experience and breadth of knowledge,” as one investor puts it. Harting, 53, also earns praise for standing by his August 2009 upgrade of ­Discover Financial Services from equal weight to overweight. Shares of the ­Riverwoods, ­Illinois–based credit card issuer jumped 74.6 percent in the 12 months through August 2011, from $14.41 to $25.16, and leaped past the sector by 45.6 percentage points.