< The 2014 All-Europe Research Team
J.P. Morgan Cazenove reclaims the No. 1 position after spending two years in second place. Leader Marco Dion is going out on top; in January he moved to a new role at the firm, working on improving clients’ execution, implementation and hedging. One fund manager hails the London-based team of three for delivering research that is “always pragmatic and can be implemented and used for real portfolios.” Dion, 37, contends that investors are “more interested in the right products than the right strategies,” he says. “You may have the best model in the world to trade credit, for example, but the truth is that if investors don’t want credit in their portfolios, nobody cares about it.” Money managers appreciate that insight. “They understand the pulse of the European quant space,” avers another backer. Products that have been popular and will continue to find favor over the next year, Dion’s squad believes, include low-volatility, low-beta and minimum-variance instruments. Also increasingly prevalent are so-called smart-beta strategies, whereby alternative indexing is used to lower equity risk and diversify portfolios. It’s becoming “a new asset class where, via those products, you get beta so you get the market — but you get the market with a twist,” Dion explains. “You get exposure to equities, but at the same time, you get exposure to cheap stocks.” See also Mislav Matejka’s profiles in the 2013 All-Europe Research Team and 2012 All-Europe Research Team. |
