Andreas Willi & team J.P. Morgan Cazenove
The buy side says: “They are not afraid of being too tough before company managements.”
Returning to No. 1 after a year in second place, the J.P. Morgan Cazenove quintet directed by Andreas Willi, 40, is prized for “impeccable stock picking,” as one buy-sider puts it. In October 2009 the analysts upgraded Stockholm-based truck maker and auto-parts distributor Scania from neutral to overweight, at 89.82 Swedish kronor, on a turnaround in demand for engine parts. By late December 2010 the stock had soared to Skr154.70, a gain of 72.2 percent that bested the sector by 44.4 percentage points. Last March the team launched coverage on the Weir Group with an overweight rating, at 781p, reasoning that capital spending, especially among its mining customers, would pick up. It did — and by the end of the year, shares of the U.K.-based manufacturer of power-station pumps had catapulted a heart-stopping 127.9 percent, to 1,780p, compared with a sector gain of 23.6 percent.
