Morgan Stanley boasts, in Anand Iyer, one of the most-respected and top-ranked analysts in US convertible bonds. He and his team have also constructed one of the few useful and informative websites on the product, convertbond.com.
Senior executives will also tell you that the bank has one of the best trading desks for converts, if not the best. It's not so easy to get a sense of that from clients, although in surveys carried out by Greenwich Associates, among others, Morgan Stanley often places top.
But Morgan Stanley's record in convertible issuance in recent years has been patchy, as it readily acknowledges. "We carved out a great spot in tech convertible issuance in the late 1990s," says Dan Simkowitz, managing director and head of equity products at Morgan Stanley. "But we didn't have ourselves best organized for after the bubble."
As convertible issuance reached record levels in 2000 and 2001, Morgan Stanley was no more than an also-ran, and that hardly improved in the first few months of 2002. It was a period of new structures and new issuers as the convertible bond product was used for the first time by many high-grade issuers that just two years before would have kept a haughty distance.