2015 All-Asia Research Team: Equity Strategy, No. 1: Jonathan Garner & team

<The 2015 All-Asia Research Team Jonathan Garner & teamMorgan StanleyFirst-place appearances: 3

Total appearances: 11

Team debut: 1996

Jonathan Garnerguides his 11-strong crew in Hong Kong from third place up to No. 1, marking Morgan Stanley’s first top finish since 2002. The strategists possess “great insights on market trends,” one client remarks. Another fund manager is impressed with the team’s “broad research coverage across macro investing.” Garner, 50, and his colleagues are recommending that investors overweight stocks in China, India and Singapore while underweighting those in South Korea and Thailand. Over the 12 months through April, the shares respectively rose 43.5 percent, 18.3 percent, 6.6 percent, 2 percent and 6 percent, against the broad Asia ex-Japan market’s advance of 14.6 percent. Their key investment themes for the balance of 2015 are subdued inflation and regional monetary easing. Despite expectations of subdued growth in the region, the researchers deem the U.S. economy’s strong rebound a boon to Asian exporters. Chinese equities, moreover, should get a further boost from several catalysts, he notes, including the government’s deleveraging and structural reform agenda, “a transition of China’s economy into a more consumption- and services-driven one,” historically low valuations and improvements in return on equity performance at those Chinese banks’ boasting the lowest levels of nonperforming loans. Against this backdrop, he reports, they are bullish on banking, energy, health care, insurance, real estate and technology hardware sectors. But they advise clients to underweight the capital goods; food, beverages and tobacco; personal products; and transportation industries. Garner is Morgan Stanley’s chief Asia and emerging-markets equity strategist. He joined the firm in November 2006, having held similar positions at Credit Suisse, DLJ International Securities and Robert Fleming Securities. Earlier in his career he worked as an academic at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he earned a master’s degree in economics. He also holds a first-class master’s in politics, philosophy and economics from England’s University of Oxford.