THIRD TEAM

Pedro Martins Jr. & team  BofA Merrill Lynch Global Research

Down one notch to No. 3 is the BofA Merrill Lynch Global Research trio overseen by Pedro Martins Jr. in São Paulo. Clients praise the strategists for “top-down analysis that helps me with my sector allocations” and for being “very careful in selecting stocks, considering both top-down and bottom-up perspectives.” The team noted in early February that it was too early to judge the effectiveness of Brazil’s new president, Dilma Rousseff, who took office the previous month. However, the strategists thought the new administration was “moving in the right direction” by developing a monetary-tightening cycle to facilitate central bank operational independence, a continued commitment to infrastructure investments and a 50 billion real ($31.2 billion) cut in expenditures. Among the sectors they believed likely to outperform were health care, food and infrastructure, and so far they’ve been right: By late July those sectors had advanced 10.6 percent, 7.7 percent and 6.8 percent, respectively, compared with a 5.5 percent loss for MSCI emerging-markets Latin America index over the same period.