Andrew Garthwaite & team Credit Suisse
The buy side says: “They look at all possibleangles — and beyond.”
The Credit Suisse crew of four helmed by Andrew Garthwaite, which rises one rung to finish in first place for the first time, is “on top of absolutely everything that might affect the landscape,” insists one supporter. In December 2009 the strategists recommended overweighting consumer companies with exposure to emerging markets, which they argued were undervalued, especially luxury brands such as Millennium & Copthorne Hotels, then at 364.70p. By late December 2010 the London-based hotel chain’s stock had catapulted 61.9 percent, to 590.50p, and outpaced the broad market by 55.5 percentage points. In May the team pounded the table on German equities as less leveraged than their counterparts elsewhere in Europe; by the end of the year, the MSCI Germany index had advanced 14.4 percent and was ahead of the MSCI Europe index by 5.3 percentage points. The 48-year-old Garthwaite, who also leads the No. 3 team in U.K. coverage, is a 1984 graduate of the University of Bristol with a bachelor’s degree in econometrics and economic history; he joined Credit Suisse in 2000 from UBS Warburg, where he led the global asset-allocation team.