Christopher Hogbin & team, Sanford C. Bernstein
The buy side says: “They tune out the noise and focus on the long term.”
The Sanford C. Bernstein group led by Christopher Hogbin repeats in first place. The three members of the team, all of whom work out of London, cover Europe’s seven largest food retailers. Hogbin, 37, believes the sector is attractively valued and is trading at a small premium to the broad market, but he is cautioning clients to keep a close watch on how these companies “cope in what we expect will remain a tough macroeconomic environment, especially as food inflation subsides,” he says. The team has buy ratings on Dutch supermarket chain Royal Ahold and U.K.-based supermarket operator Tesco, on the belief that most investors have not fully appreciated the companies’ earnings growth potential; those stocks outperformed Europe’s broad market by 20.8 and 7.1 percentage points, respectively, last year. One buy-sider says that in addition to the analysts’ solid research, he admires how Hogbin interacts with company executives: “I like the way he asks questions to management — even classic questions are asked in a way that enables an optimized answer.”