Barclays Capital
The buy side says: “These analysts dig deep and drill down to the core.”
Maneesh Deshpande, 42, Evren Ergin, 39, and Venu Krishna, 44, lead the Barclays Capital crew of six to the top spot for a fourth consecutive year in the sector formerly known as Equity Derivatives. It was rechristened this year as Equity-Linked Strategies to reflect the broader, more comprehensive approach that many firms are taking with regard to hybrid debt securities. Boosters cheer the BarCap team for its March 2009 recommendation that they implement a buy-write strategy, purchasing certain volatile stocks, which changed monthly, and simultaneously selling their call options, thus earning income through the option premiums. Through August 2010 the strategy returned 49.3 percent, Deshpande says, while the benchmark buy-write monthly index advanced just 25.2 percent. In November they urged investors to buy the 4 percent 2034 convertible bonds of Chevy Chase, Maryland’s CapitalSource, on the strength of the corporate-finance firm’s capital reserves. By the end of August, the hybrid bond had posted a total return of 22.5 percent.
