Alexei Moisseev & team Renaissance
second team Reinhard Cluse, Clemens Grafe & team UBS
third team Arend Kapteyn & team Deutsche
The RenCap team takes top honors for a third year running. Led for the first time by Alexei Moisseev, the Moscow-based researchers broke with the consensus in January 2009 and insisted that Russia’s Central Bank would discontinue its controlled devaluation of the ruble, then at roughly 31 against the dollar, and let market forces determine the bottom. Two weeks later the Central Bank announced an end to the policy. RenCap predicted the ruble would drop to 35; it slid to R36.46 in February before reversing, prompting the team to predict it would top out at R29 by the end of the year. In November the ruble reached its 2009 peak of R28.67 against the dollar. Moisseev, 36, earned an MBA at the University of Rochester’s Simon Graduate School of Business in New York in 1998. He worked as a senior economist at Russia’s Central Bank and as a senior sovereigns analyst at BNP Paribas before joining RenCap in 2001.
In second place for a second year is the UBS quintet co-captained by Reinhard Cluse and newcomer Clemens Grafe. The London-based team created a proprietary leading economic indicator in July for seven EMEA countries to gauge turning points in the local economies, concluding that each had entered or was about to enter a period of economic recovery. Since then, through January, the broad market in the Czech Republic was up 15.5 percent; Hungary was up 47 percent; Israel was up 18.8 percent; Poland was up 31.9 percent; Russia was up 33.5 percent; South Africa was up 11.8 percent; and Turkey was up 42 percent.
The six-strong Deutsche squad steered by Arend Kapteyn rises from runner-up to third. Investors say they appreciate the London-based analysts’ “Emerging Markets Monthly” reports, calling particular attention to the September edition that alerted them to an impending financial crisis in Dubai, two months before the emirate requested a freeze on $26 billion in debt payments.
Click here to view the complete rankings for The Emerging EMEA Research Team
