Ed Hyman ISI Group
The buy side says: “Ed is an institution — no doubt about it.”
All-America Research Team Hall of Famer Ed Hyman of ISI Group logs another year at No. 1. We added the Economics sector to the survey in 1976; Hyman, then with C.J. Lawrence, debuted as a runner-up that year and by 1980 had climbed to the top — and he’s been there ever since, for a remarkable (and record-shattering) 32 consecutive appearances in the winner’s circle. One client insists that Hyman’s daily reports are a must-read: “They’re three pages of fact-filled bullet points, with pictures and graphs,” this investor says. “They’re a quick, efficient, user-friendly way to see what’s going on in the economy.” One trend Hyman, 66, identified in March was overheating in the commodities markets; he warned that prices were near their peak, owing to austerity measures in emerging markets and oversupply, among other factors. The S&P Goldman Sachs commodities index reached a 52-week high one month later; by the end of August, it had dropped 11.3 percent. Hyman “provides you with high-frequency economic statistics. ISI will survey 1,000 freight expediters on a weekly basis, giving you real-time data from players in the economy while the government is polling four times a year. That kind of work gives you the edge in understanding tipping points well ahead of the official statistics,” adds another buy-sider.