< The 2014 All-Europe Research Team Oswald ClintOil & Gas Exploration & ProductionSanford C. Bernstein

Oswald Clint became captain of Sanford C. Bernstein’s Oil & Gas Exploration & Production team in 2011. It earned a runner-up position that year and in 2012, advanced to third place last year and jumps to the summit this year. And although the group’s ascension to the top has been fairly straightforward, Clint’s career trajectory has been anything but. He decided to become an analyst after seeing an advertisement in an energy industry trade magazine, even though he wasn’t quite sure what the job entailed.

“As a geophysicist, half-academic, and back then a consultant, I had little idea of what equity research was all about,” the 39-year-old recalls. “However, at Sanford Bernstein I was given the platform to use all these prior skills and take the research direction in my own way.”

The London-based analyst says that a lot of things about the job appeal to him, including “identifying valuable assets in companies’ portfolios by combining geology and numbers, investigating and answering investors’ tough questions, thinking up new research topics and interacting with companies from this side of the fence,” Clint explains. “What I like less is the short-term focus on quarterly results at the moment, which means good assets and strategies go unrewarded.”Read His Profile