John Glass Morgan Stanley The buy side says: “He has the golden touch on stocks.”
According to one buy-side advocate, two words best describe Boston-based John Glass: “thoughtful and thorough.” The 47-year-old Morgan Stanley analyst, who is No. 1 for a second straight year — and for the third time in four years — upgraded Starbucks Corp. from equal weight to overweight in March, at $33.36. After conducting a survey of 1,500 coffee drinkers, Glass concluded that a significant portion of Green Mountain Coffee Roasters’ customers and users of the single-cup brewers made by its Keurig subsidiary would switch to Starbucks-brand brew if the Seattle-based company were to offer a similar product. Three days after the upgrade, Starbucks and Waterbury, Vermont–based Green Mountain announced that they would join forces to sell Starbucks coffee for Keurig machines. Starbucks’ stock had percolated to $38.62 by late August, for a 15.8 percent gain that led the sector by 9.3 percentage points.
