Andrew Laperriere & team  ISI Group

The buy side says: “A lot of analysts won’t go out on a limb the way he does.”

ISI Group scores another first-place win — its ninth consecutive — but this time the team of four is led by Andrew ­Laperriere; longtime leader Thomas D. Gallagher left the firm in September 2010 for Scowcroft Group, an international business advisory firm. The Washington-­based strategists alerted clients as early as August 2010 that “huge Democratic losses” were likely in last fall’s midterm elections, owing in part to the rising influence of the Tea Party, which at the time many pundits were dismissing as merely opponents of President Obama’s health care legislation; the ISI team was right, and the Democrats suffered what Obama dubbed a “shellacking.” In mid-July 2011 the team warned that a downgrade of the U.S.’s triple-A credit rating was more likely than the media were reporting. In early August, Standard & Poor’s reduced the U.S.’s credit rating to AA+. Laperriere “did a good job handicapping results for the last election, and he noted the resoluteness of the new Tea Party Caucus,” recalls one backer. Laperriere, 43, earned a master’s degree in economics from George Mason University in 1997. He worked for Representative Dick Armey of Texas before joining ISI in 1999.