Carlos Peyrelongue & team BofA Merrill Lynch Global Research
The buy side says: “Carlos is very knowledgeable.”
Taking the top spot for the first time — vaulting all the way from runner-up — is the three-member BofA Merrill Lynch Global Research team captained by Mexico City–based Carlos Peyrelongue, who also helms the No. 1 squad in Mexico. “Carlos was the first to foresee the deterioration of homebuilders’ balance sheets,” recalls one advocate. The analysts downgraded Corp. GEO, Mexico’s second-largest homebuilder by market value, from neutral to underperform in February, at 39.87 Mexican pesos, largely on declining sales growth. Through July shares of the Mexico City–based concern plummeted 41 percent, to N$23.51, trailing the sector by 24.7 percentage points and Mexico’s broad market by 38.1 points. Also in February the team slashed Culiacán, Sinaloa–based Desarrolladora Homex from buy to neutral, at N$63.71, on the rival homebuilder’s growing debt. In May, after the stock had sunk 22.5 percent, to N$49.40, they upgraded it to buy, on valuation. The shares ended July at N$51.28, up 3.8 percent, and the analysts remain bullish. Peyrelongue, 42, earned a bachelor’s degree in economics at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México in 1992 and an MBA at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business in 1998. He worked as a mutual fund manager at Santander before moving to Merrill Lynch in 2001.
