< The 2014 All-Europe Fixed-Income Research Team
It’s four years in a row in second place for Nomura International. Since 2012 the 15-strong crew has been shepherded by Anthony Morris, who “provides good, broad insight and isn’t afraid to stand out,” one supporter declares. The researchers — in Hong Kong, London, Singapore and Tokyo — have increasingly fielded queries from investors about using quantitative analysis to make their trading and investment procedures “more objective,” reports London-based Morris. “People seem to be more and more persuaded that the traditional approach, which has a large degree of subjectivity in it, is no longer good enough.” So his team is working with clients “to design processes that use data and other objective tools to [arrive at] investment decisions, whether within a particular asset class or allocating across asset classes,” he says. For example, instead of deploying the traditional asset-allocation framework of 60 percent equities and 40 percent bonds, a more productive balance can be struck by measuring economic momentum to track the direction of changes in an economy through analysis of macro survey or weekly unemployment data. Investors can then weight more heavily to equities when an economy is on an upward trend and allocate more to credit when it is leaning toward worse performance. “The economy doesn’t have to be good. It just has to be improving,” explains Morris. “So going from bad to less bad will still result in improving equity markets most of the time.” |