< The 2014 All-America Research Team
Total Appearances: 7
Analyst Debut: 2008Morgan Stanley’s Benjamin Swinburne repeats in first place on this roster and earns his first No. 1 finish in Media. “Ben is a master at both strategic and financial modeling,” reports one portfolio manager. Another notes that Swinburne was the first researcher to “grasp the power of retransmission fees to fundamentally improve the broadcast business model” and to “recognize the importance of pricing power in broadband.” The Standard & Poor’s Cable and Satellite Index climbed 13 percent year to date through mid-September, besting the nation’s broad market by 5.7 percentage points, and Swinburne believes that trend with continue. Drivers going forward include “continued success for cable operators in taking share from their telecommunications competition both in the U.S. and Europe,” he says, as well as “the regulatory outlook following the closing of two major mergers in the sector and how younger-generation households adopt pay-TV services relative to the broader U.S. market.” The 39-year-old analyst monitors 28 companies across both his sectors, and although he maintains his long-standing bullishness on El Segundo, California’s DirecTV, Swinburne downgraded the satellite TV operator from overweight to equal weight in May. Dallas-based multinational telecommunications services provider AT&T had just announced its intention to acquire DirecTV for $95 per share, or a total of $48.5 billion. Its stock was then up 22.6 percent for the year to date, at $84.65, and leading the sector by 20 percentage points. He advised investors that the terms of the deal, whereby each stakeholder would receive $28.50 per DirecTV share plus $66.50 per share in AT&T share, would constrain DirecTV’s price within a narrow range. As of mid-September it was up 2.7 percent, to $86.94, and trailed its peers by 7.4 percentage points.