Just over a year ago, Gary Jenkins, at the time head of fundamental credit strategy at Deutsche Bank, left to join Synapse Investment Management in a prime example of a sell-side analyst leaving to join the buy side. Despite this, Deutsche Bank, with credit strategy now run solely by Jim Reid, actually climbed in investment-grade credit strategy, from seventh to third, and remained second in high-yield credit strategy.
It is not just the buy side that analysts are moving to. UBS banking analyst Raj Malhotra moved to the bank’s debt capital markets division as senior coverage officer for Nordics in August. UBS did not replace Malhotra as such, but promoted Damien Regent to head overall credit research coverage of European financial institutions.
More recently, Lehman Brothers’ head of European structured finance research, Krishna Prasad, left to pursue other opportunities. Lehman climbed slightly in the poll but will need to cover the loss of Prasad quickly to maintain its research coverage.
BNP Paribas is among the worst hit in terms of loss of senior analysts. Most notably, head of credit research Marc Watton has left and will look outside financial markets for his next challenge. The French bank has also lost Rick Deutsch, who was originally hired as European head of credit research but in 2006 was moved over to head the trading desk research side, and Roger Appleyard, formerly head of credit research at ABN Amro before moving to BNP Paribas as a senior telecoms analyst. All three left recently, leaving Vivek Tawady with a difficult rebuilding job ahead of him.
CreditSights, the independent credit research provider that scored well in trade ideas, has just lost senior credit strategist Christian Stracke. Stracke has been appointed by Pimco as co-head of credit research in yet another example of an analyst moving to the buy side.
Elsewhere, more banks have been losing analysts than have not, and the effects can be seen in the poll’s results. Two of the hardest hit are Dresdner Kleinwort and Barclays Capital, each losing four analysts. Dresdner’s results reflect this, but all four of Barclays’ analysts left in February and March this year, so its results were less affected.