Americans have learned a lot in recent days about counting , and recounting , and far more than they ever wanted to know about chads, dimples and butterfly designs. But as we go to press, three weeks after the election, they still haven,t learned just who their next president will be.
By Michael Carroll
December 2000
Institutional Investor Magazine
Such imprecision may suffice for the world,s mightiest democracy , but it simply won,t do for a magazine like ours. Six times a year we publish our rankings of the finest research analysts in different geographic regions, soliciting and tabulating ballots from thousands of voters at buy-side institutions around the world, and we have real deadlines to meet.
At any given time, three research teams are in progress here. This month features our newest, the Global Research Team, which made its debut in 1997. Then, the concept of global research was still a fledgling one; today, as markets creep ever closer to one another, and continent-straddling behemoths like DaimlerChrysler, BP Amoco and Vodafone Group are born, global research has become a reality, though Wall Street firms take characteristically idiosyncratic approaches.
The task of designing and executing these team rankings falls to Senior Editors Carolyn Sargent and Jane Kenney. Sargent spearheads the initial selection of appropriate sectors for each respective team and assigns and edits the write-ups that appear in this magazine’s pages. Kenney, a 20-year veteran of Institutional Investor, oversees the dedicated research staff that qualifies voters, distributes and collects ballots and tabulates the votes. Each team ranking is guided by a project manager whose responsibilities range from tracking analyst movements to producing the final rankings and tables.
Senior Associate Editor William Gaston directly supervised the Global team. His duties ranged from contacting institutional investors and heads of equity research at sell-side firms for suggestions and feedback to researching the selection of the 23 sectors to constantly tracking all of the buy-side and sell-side firms that are players in the global arena.
“Over the years, we have developed systems for checking and rechecking our votes to make sure that our tallies are as accurate and fair as possible,” says Kenney. “Like the U.S. government, we believe in checks and balances.”
Rigorous procedures make all the difference in producing results that can be, well, counted on.
