The 2015 All-Europe Research Team: Equity Derivatives, No. 1: Simon Carter & team

Simon Carter & team

Deutsche Bank

First-Place Appearances: 9

Total Appearances: 14

Team Debut: 2001

Deutsche Bank records its fifth straight first-place showing on this roster. Pamela Finelli, co-captain from 2011 through 2014, has moved to New York to take on a broadened role that includes heading up the firm’s U.S. synthetic and equity derivatives team, so the group of seven strategists is now under the sole direction of Simon Carter. He and his London-based squad win client praise for their “very high-quality research,” as one money manager reports. One subject the analysts have been spotlighting is portfolio managers’ growing use of sector-based derivatives, which they expect will continue. Although these instruments are not new, understanding of them has improved, says Carter, as has awareness of the amount of liquidity surrounding them. Moreover, sector-focused derivatives offer investors the ability “to get at specific themes that you cannot necessarily trade via broad index options,” he explains. “If you wanted to play a European recovery, you could buy the Euro Stoxx 50. Or you could say, ‘I think the one sector that’s going to do really well if you have quantitative easing might be the bank sector.’ So it’s just a really neat way to play a theme with a much higher level of accuracy.” Another increasingly popular trend the team has pinpointed is the selling of single-stock put options. Investors, which have historically employed call overwriting, take advantage of the selling opportunities as they “look outside the traditional yield enhancement strategies into new areas of income generation,” Carter notes.