< The 2015 Latin America Research Team

Total Appearances: 14

Team Debut: 1993Bank of America Merrill Lynch advances from second place to claim its first No. 1 finish on this roster since 1999, sending Itaú BBA down to No. 2 after four years on top. Team leader Anne Milne, who marks her fifth year at the helm, joined the firm in June 2010 from Deutsche Bank, where she spent eight years managing the emerging-markets corporate credit research squad, leading that group to first place on Institutional Investor’s All-America Fixed-Income Research Team six times between 2003 and 2009. She previously worked at J.P. Morgan, Trust Co. of the West, ING Barings and the World Bank and holds a master’s degree in international economics from the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Washington and an undergraduate degree in international studies from California’s University of the Pacific. Milne advises that her Latin America corporate debt team — whose members are stationed in London, New York and São Paulo — is “paying particular attention to the performance of commodities producers, given the large reduction in prices for many commodities.” These companies account for nearly 64 percent of the region’s corporate credit market, she notes, versus 40 percent for emerging markets as a whole. As of early July, the researcher says, high-yield credits generally were offering better value than investment grade, “since we are now at five-year tights in spread terms on investment-grade credits, and we still have room to tighten as well as absorb U.S. Treasury volatility.” The analysts also anticipate that spreads on Brazilian nonsovereign debt will contract by year’s end as a corruption scandal surrounding state-controlled oil giant Petróleo Brasileiro, or Petrobras, subsides. Milne and her colleagues are “very detail-oriented and not afraid to dive into the idiosyncrasies of every credit, be it an Israeli-Peruvian utility company or a mammoth estate-owned oil company,” observes one money manager. Among the tranches that they advise investors to overweight are the 9 percent tier-1 perpetuals of the region’s largest lender, by assets, Banco do Brasil; Peruvian power generator Inkia Energy’s 8.375 percent bonds due in 2021; and Argentina-based energy company Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales’s 8.75 percent credits marturing in 2024.