< The 2014 All-America Research TeamJohn MendelsonISI GroupFirst-place appearances: 1

Total appearances: 21

Team debut: 1977John Mendelson of ISI Group, who earns second-place honors for a third consecutive year — and celebrates his 21st appearance on this roster — has put on his hat and coat and shut off his Bloomberg terminal. After more than a half-century in finance, he said farewell in August. “I will certainly miss him,” says one buy-side admirer. “He had a ton of hard-won wisdom and market knowledge. He’d been through so many cycles that he’d seen every kind of market. He didn’t get upset over minor zig-zags. He’d reserve judgment until he saw more data points before he declared that a trend was clearly established or reversed. What I valued most,” the investor adds, “was that he didn’t hesitate to have a contrary opinion.” Mendelson is exiting with a Parthian shot — a stern admonition on liquidity. “I remain concerned about the liquidity of the current equity market,” he says. “In a long Wall Street career, this is the poorest level of liquidity I have ever seen. Structural change in the stock market is something that has occurred without investors taking much notice. Perhaps the most important aspects of the loss of liquidity are the ‘mechanical’ changes in the capital markets, [including] the demise of the [New York Stock Exchange] specialist system. If you’ve seen a TV picture of the NYSE floor recently — where once there were crowds around many posts —now you could play touch football down there without disturbing anyone. There is nobody there except for TV announcers. Specialists were graded by the NYSE on their stabilization record — buying on minus ticks, selling on plus ticks — and were awarded new stocks based on these grades as well as on their capital. In a nutshell, my view is that those players who had been stabilizers in the market are all gone.”