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Francisco Blanch & team |
Bank of America Merrill Lynch |
First-Place Appearances: 1 Total Appearances: 3 Team Debut: 2011 |
After a year’s absence, Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s squad under the direction of Francisco Blanch makes a stunning return to this roster, toppling three-time champion VTB Capital to claim the firm’s first No. 1 finish. Blanch captains a team of nine strategists in London and New York, and is “deeply knowledgeable about the entire sector and its trends,” as one loyalist puts it. He and his colleagues are forecasting that global oil commodities, specifically Brent crude, will trade within a range. Increasing supplies of U.S. shale oil and Canadian oil sands should “temper further price appreciation in energy commodities,” Blanch explains, although prices could drop next year if Iran and Libya reenter the market. At the same time, demand in general — already weak the past two years during the European recession — is hardly robust, he notes, with developed markets overall still struggling to post strong growth. One mitigating factor, however, is the increasing energy consumption in such emerging markets as China and India. On the natural-gas front, the analysts believe that North America has upside in the medium term, thanks to large pent-up demand, and expect prices to head higher. Asia has medium-term downside, they advise, because more liquefied natural gas from Australia and Qatar will hit the market beginning in the second half of 2015. Finally, Europe is in between, with prices constrained within a range. As a result, for investors in emerging Europe, the Middle East and Africa, “depending on where you are, you’re going to be capturing one differential or another,” explains the 40-year-old team leader. He cites as an example Qatar, where “you’re still doing pretty well because you’re exporting to Asia, but you have some downside risks on the current prices.” Blanch joined the London offices of BofA Merrill in 2005 to head up commodities and derivatives research; he moved to New York in 2010. Previously, he worked for five years as a global energy economist at Goldman Sachs & Co. The strategist earned a master’s degree in public administration at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government in Massachusetts and a Ph.D. in economics from Spain’s Complutense University of Madrid.