< The 2015 All-Japan Research Team
Hayato Nagayoshi
Mizuho Securities Group
First-Place Appearances: 1
Total Appearances: 4
Analyst Debut: 2011
This year buy-siders for the first time name Hayato Nagayoshi of Mizuho Securities Group the best quantitative research analyst in Japan, elevating him from the No. 2 position and sending nine-time sector champion Takaaki Yoshino of Daiwa Securities Group down to third place. One enthusiast is grateful that Nagayoshi is “very responsive to customized requests.” Another investor credits him with having “an original approach that attempts to quantify causal relationships in many kinds of investment factors.” Indeed, the 41-year-old strategist advises that a “deeper understanding of factor return is getting more and more important to protect funds, as we have recently seen extreme factor returns much more frequently than before.” The most important input to track is long-term interest rates, he believes, because low rates have encouraged investors to move out of bonds and into equities, leading to the popularity of high-dividend stocks and minimum-variance smart beta approaches for investors in low-risk bonds searching for relatively comparable equity investments. In addition, low interest rates contribute to a polarization of valuations whereby the shares of stocks with higher price-to-earnings ratios rise by larger margins than those of their less expensive peers. Nagayoshi graduated from the University of Tokyo with a bachelor’s degree in engineering and worked as a quants strategist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch for nearly a dozen years before joining Mizuho in September 2012.