THIRD TEAM

Luis Oganes & team  J.P. Morgan

Despite tumbling from first to third, the 14-member J.P. Morgan contingent guided by New York–based Luis Oganes “continues to outshine other research groups in the quality of its high-frequency coverage,” insists one buy-side backer. The team urged money managers to overweight Venezuela and Argentina bonds in August and September 2010, respectively, predicting that those countries would outperform other emerging markets despite investor concerns about the sustainability of their policy stances. In March the economists advised clients to take profits on the Argentina bonds, after the country had outperformed the firm’s emerging-markets bond index by 8.6 percentage points; in April they rendered the same advice regarding the Venezuelan instruments, when they were ahead of the benchmark by 8.2 percentage points. Since the downgrades outperformance of the Argentine instruments narrowed to less than 1 percentage point, while the Venezuelan bonds’ lead on the broader index slipped to 3.4 percentage points, through July.