SECOND TEAM
Brian Chase & team J.P. Morgan
Argentina returns to the survey this year — it was removed in 2010 after MSCI downgraded the country to frontier-market status, but analysts on both the buy and sell sides asked us to bring it back — and shooting straight in to second place is the four-person J.P. Morgan team led by Brian Chase, who also directs the No. 1 teams covering Chile and North Andean Countries. Chase, who works out of Santiago (the other three team members are based in Buenos Aires), “is plugged in, and he knows the country well, and his team produces a lot of good research,” declares one buy-side backer. “More than any other firm, J.P. Morgan is able to integrate bottom-up research with disciplined, top-down research from a fantastic emerging-markets economic team.” In February the team initiated coverage on MercadoLibre with an overweight rating on the American depositary receipts, at $71.93, on the view that the Buenos Aires–based provider of e-commerce platforms and services would benefit from rising consumer spending in the region. The ADRs shot above $92 in early May before being dragged down by market turbulence; they ended July at $79.42, for a gain of 10.4 percent that outpaced Argentina’s broad market by 19.5 percentage points.