Christopher Hogbin & team Sanford C. Bernstein
The buy side says: “The depth of Chris’s knowledge of the industry is exceptional.”
Leaping from third place to first is the trio of Sanford C. Bernstein analysts under the direction of Christopher Hogbin, 36. Clients applaud the team for focusing on “long-term investment success rather than shorter-term trading and news-flow noise,” as one buy-sider puts it. The researchers upgraded Metro from neutral to buy in September, at €42.33, on the belief that the Dusseldorf-based hypermarket operator would benefit from a rise in consumer spending in Germany, Poland and Russia. The stock had zipped to €58.53 by early December, a gain of 38.3 percent that bested the sector by 37.7 percentage points, and the analysts downgraded it to hold, on valuation. It ended that month at €53.88. Hogbin, who earned a master’s degree in economics at Cambridge University’s Gonville and Caius College in 1996 and an MBA at Harvard Business School in 2000, joined Bernstein in 2005 from Boston Consulting Group, where he worked as a retail strategy consultant.