< The 2015 All-Europe Research Team
Michael Pickup & team
Barclays
First-place appearances: 3
Total appearances: 6
Team debut: 2010
With its drop to No. 3, Barclays’s run at the top of this list ends at three years. London-based Michael Pickup, 43, and his teammate monitor 16 regional oil services names. One favorite in that group is Maire Tecnimont, an Italian infrastructure engineering and general contracting concern. Advising that the company would benefit from management’s efforts to refinance debt and exit underperforming units, they elevated the stock from equal weight to overweight, at €1.18. By April it had catapulted to €2.87 but then was dragged down in a general energy company sell-off, only to rebound in November and close January at €1.96. Even so, it had soared 73.5 percent — and outperformed the sector by 126.8 percentage points — since their upgrade. An example of a name that is no longer among the analysts’ most preferred is Italy’s Saipem, which provides offshore drilling and construction services. In December 2013, Pickup and his colleague reiterated their overweight rating on the shares, believing that the implications of recent worrisome earnings reports had already been discounted into the price, so Saipem was primed to recover. In April, however, with the stock up 21.5 percent, at €19, and ahead of its peers by 20.7 percentage points, they lowered their rating to equal weight. Saipem’s contracts were not performing as projected, they noted, and by the end of last month, the shares had plummeted to €8.03, for a loss of 57.7 percent that was worse even than the sector’s 48.6 percent plunge. “Mick is skilled at seizing opportunities,” attests one follower.