Prominent Wall Street strategist Tobias Levkovich has been awarded two posthumous positions on the 2021 All-America Research Team.
Levkovich, 60, passed away on October 1 after being struck by a car in September. He was a managing director at Citigroup who had been serving as the bank’s chief U.S. equity strategist since 2001.
Over the course of his long sell-side career, Levkovich earned six first-team positions on Institutional Investor’s All-America Research Team while covering the Machinery and Engineering & Construction sectors. He would make 31 total appearances on the AART, including being recognized this year as runner-up in the Equity-Linked Strategies and Portfolio Strategy sectors.
“Tobias was a brilliant and highly insightful strategist, for which he was well known throughout the industry,” members of the senior management team said in an email to Citi Research colleagues. “He worked at Citi for a little over 33 years, and over that span of time became a face of the Citi franchise.”
Wrote Paco Ybarra, CEO of Citi’s institutional clients group, in a memo to staff in early October, “It would be an understatement to say that Tobias was well known and highly regarded beyond our research division. He was a fixture within the halls of Citi, always stopping to engage with colleagues or discuss his latest market call. His charisma and energy were unmatched.”
Levkovich also served as a mentor and sponsor for people in the early stages of their finance careers, according to Lori Calvasina, head of U.S. equity strategy at RBC Capital Markets. She worked as an equity strategist under Levkovich’s guidance in the 2000s.
“Helping women advance wasn’t a big topic of conversation on Wall Street at the time,” Calvasina wrote on LinkedIn. “But at least for me, Tobias exemplified what it means to be a sponsor. And he never patted himself on the back once for doing it.”
In a separate LinkedIn post, Michael Bilerman, managing director at Citi, said: “Tobias touched everyone he came into contact with. He was completely selfless and humble. It didn’t matter who you were — how junior, how senior, what job you had — he always made time for you. This wasn’t an act. It was innately who he was. A man with enormous spirit, compassion, and humanity. A man who made you smile, laugh, and think. And a man who gave everyone time.”
Amanda Agati, chief investment officer at PNC Financial Services Group, mourns Levkovich’s death as “truly the end of an era,” describing him on Twitter as “a nice person and a talented, quick-witted strategist.”
David Rosenberg, chief economist and strategist at Rosenberg Research & Associates, says that in his 11 years at wealth management firm Gluskin Sheff & Associates, “there was nobody else from the sell-side strategy space that could fill a room like Tobias did.” He writes in an emailed tribute that Levkovich was “really one in a million, likely more than that.”
Rosenberg concludes, “He was a favorite of all the portfolio managers, and always left us smarter at the end of the meeting than at the beginning.”
