Takaaki Yoshino Daiwa Securities Group The buy side says: “He produces a prodigious amount of work and is available for individual consultation.”

For a sixth consecutive year — and for the seventh time in eight years — Takaaki Yoshino of Daiwa Securities Group claims the throne. The 45-year-old analyst’s reports are “interesting, unique and useful” and cover a “wide variety of themes,” clients say. One theme that Yoshino addressed in a series of three reports last year was the relationship between individual stocks’ risks and market risk. Building on work by academics Fousseni Chabi-Yo and Jun Yang on idiosyncratic coskewness (ICSK) — a measure of the comovement of individual stock variance and market returns — with regard to U.S. equities, Yoshino confirmed that their finding regarding anomalously low returns for distressed stocks applied as well to the Japanese market. Portfolio managers should consider not only the mean and standard deviation, but also ICSK, to determine changes in investor expectations and market behavior, Yoshino concluded.

Polling and tabulation of data as well as reporting on the sector profiles were completed before the March 11 Tohoku earthquake.