Ben Laidler & team J.P. Morgan
The buy side says: “Ben Laidler knows the Latin America region better than any other strategist.”
Climbing the final rung to finish on top for the first time is the J.P. Morgan quartet conducted by Ben Laidler, who also leads the top-ranked team in Mexico. The New York–based strategists “possess a wealth of information and experience,” declares one backer. The team upgraded Mexico from neutral to overweight in December, citing that country’s manufacturing growth and declining inflation. By the end of July, the benchmark Índice de Precios y Cotizaciones of the Bolsa Mexicana de Valores had risen 1.8 percent, outstripping rival Brazil’s BM&F Bovespa index by 3.1 percentage points and the MSCI emerging-markets Latin America index by 3.3 points, in local currency terms. Laidler, 38, went to J.P. Morgan in 2007 from UBS, where he tracked Latin America for eight years; he earned a master of philosophy degree in economics at Cambridge University in 1994.
