Total appearances: 14

Team debut: 1994 Leading this roster for a third straight year is the Morgan Stanley squad under the direction of Guilherme Paiva, 39. “The team comes up with original and new angles to look at market issues,” one admirer reports. For example, Paiva’s “use of probability weights to see how election outcomes are priced into stocks was innovative,” says another wealth manager. For his part, the New York–based crew leader says that “at the big-picture level many emerging-markets economies continue to struggle to transition toward new economic models after the global crisis — and the Latin countries are not different from their EM peers.” Structural reforms are crucial for sustainable, stronger long-term growth, the strategists advise. They believe that Colombia, Mexico and Peru have made material progress on this front, while Brazil and to a lesser degree Chile have substantially more work ahead of them. Given their forecast that Mexico’s real gross domestic product growth will accelerate from a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 2.4 percent in the first half of this year to more than 4 percent in the second half, Paiva and his colleagues recommend that investors favor domestic cyclical sectors that are leveraged to growth, such as banking, cement and media. This year, Paiva also co-leads, with Cesar Medina, teams that earn No. 2 and runner-up positions, respectively, for their coverage of Chile and Argentina; he also heads a group that captures a runner-up ranking for its reporting on Brazil.