< The 2015 All-Europe Research Team
Mislav Matejka & team
J.P. Morgan Cazenove
First-Place Appearances: 3
Total Appearances: 7
Team Debut: 2009
For a third year running, Mislav Matejka and his J.P. Morgan Cazenove teammates headline this list. Working out of London and Mumbai, the four strategists win plaudits from one investor for their “thoughtful approach,” while another supporter points to their “insightful research” as a reason for their ongoing popularity with clients. For his part, Matejka is convinced that Europe will “show a better performance in 2015 after a relatively disappointing 2014.” He cites such tailwinds as the European Central Bank’s sovereign quantitative easing, a bottoming out of the region’s credit cycle, a weaker euro and sustainably lower oil prices. Accordingly, in November he and his colleagues reversed their recommended relative portfolio weightings, boosting euro zone equities from underweight to overweight and shifting U.S. stocks to underweight from overweight. At the time, the monetary union’s shares trailed the U.S.’s by 20.8 percentage points year to date, in dollar terms, tumbling 10.4 percent. By the end of January, euro area names had turned up slightly, outpacing America’s by 2.5 pecentage points. The strategists expect that outperformance to continue through 2015. They are particularly upbeat about the potential for a rebound in regional companies’ profitability, looking for significant earnings increases this year thanks to projected real gross domestic product growth of 1.6 percent. Typically, notes Matejka, output expansion of more than 1 percent results in double-digit earnings-per-share gains and margin expansion. In addition, the prospect of a weaker euro should boost income, he says, because some 45 percent of euro zone revenues originates abroad.