< The 2014 All-Europe Fixed-Income Research Team Philip Galdi, Alberto Ruiz-Sena & team Bank of America Merrill Lynch First-place appearances: 0
Total appearances: 3
Team debut: 2012 Bank of America Merrill Lynch retains the No. 2 position it has held since 2012. This year Philip Galdi debuts as London-based Alberto Ruiz-Sena’s co-leader, and together they oversee a crew of ten in London and New York. The analysts earn praise for their “popular Bloomberg pages that provide very easy access to indexes and analytics,” in the words of one portfolio manager. Tailoring products to help clients offset the threat of rising interest rates has been a cornerstone of the BofA Merrill team’s service over the past year. “With rates at historic lows and poised to ultimately increase, investors are looking to create interest rate–protected products and need benchmarks to support those products,” New York–based Galdi explains. “This has led to the development of short-duration and hedged-duration custom indexes for many of our clients, and we anticipate that the trend will continue, and even gain momentum, in 2014.” Similarly, since money managers have continued to look for diversification and investability beyond the region’s credit markets, the researchers last year introduced a suite of emerging-markets, local currency corporate credits indexes and subindexes that track Euroclear-settled securities, which are those most readily available to offshore investors. Finally, for those chasing riskier assets classes, the group has launched benchmarks that cover the U.S. floating-rate high-yield market and municipal high-yield securities.