SECOND TEAM

Michael Pickup & team Barclays Capital

Shooting straight in to second place is the Barclays Capital duo led by Michael Pickup, who, according to one buy-side loyalist, is “unique in explaining not only what’s happening but why — and what the implications are.” In December 2009 the team astutely upgraded John Wood Group from equal weight to overweight, at 294.50p, judging it unfairly punished over past softness in its recently streamlined engineering operations. Good call. By year-end 2010 shares of the U.K.-based supplier of underwater pumps and pressure controls had catapulted 89.8 percent, to 559p; over the same period the sector was up 38.3 percent.