Countries: United Kingdom – First

Paul Huxford & team, J.P. Morgan Cazenove

The buy side says: “They make me aware of what’s going on behind the scenes.”

The crew at J.P. Morgan Cazenove, which spent last year in second place, returns to the summit. This year the squad is shepherded by newcomer Paul Huxford, 43. “They’ve got U.K. stocks well covered thanks to the history of Cazenove, which always had — and still has — an amazing franchise,” says one buy-side supporter. The analysts follow 300 U.K. companies, and among the ones they are urging clients to overweight is Standard Chartered, on the belief that the London-based financial services firm has a strong balance sheet, good cost controls and profit strength thanks to its presence in such growing markets as China and Singapore. The team has dubbed London’s Rentokil Initial a “stock to avoid,” on the grounds that the U.K. economy, which accounts for 40 percent of the business-services conglomerate’s revenues, is “deteriorating” and growth in other markets is tepid. Huxford, who holds a bachelor’s degree in economics and finance from New Zealand’s Victoria University of Wellington, worked at Macquarie Asia in that country before moving to J.P. Morgan in Sydney in 2007 to oversee Australian equity research; he relocated to London last year after being tapped to lead European equity research.