Joyce Chang & team J.P. Morgan
The buy side says: “Joyce is an encyclopedia on emerging markets.”
Joyce Chang, 46, who shepherds J.P. Morgan’s four-member team to the No. 1 position, “knows everything there is to know about emerging markets — and then some,” applauds one impressed client. The New York–based team has landed in the winner’s circle each of the nine times the sector has been published since 1998; it did not receive enough votes to warrant publication in 2005 or 2006 or from 2008–’10. In November the analysts predicted that, thanks to strong commodities prices and secular growth in local markets that would boost yields, Latin American sovereign-debt instruments would deliver double-digit, equity-type returns in 2011; they were especially bullish on the region’s frontier markets. In the first seven months of this year, the Latin America subindex of the firm’s emerging-markets bond index returned 8.95 percent, beating the broader benchmark by 1.82 percentage points. Top performers include Ecuador, which was up 15.2 percent; Venezuela, up 14.1 percent; and Uruguay, up 10.5 percent.