How we did it

Like in the previous four years, the survey was conducted among equity fund managers of top mutual fund houses and life insurance companies in India, with minimum assets under management of Rs 1,000 crore. We approached 22 fund managers and heads of research, and asked them to nominate the five best equity analysts across research houses and sectors.

The poll was co-ordinated by Business Today’s Virendra Verma and Rachna Monga. To make it to our list, an analyst needed a minimum of three votes. (Starting last year, we had bumped up the number of qualifying votes from two to three.)

There were 12 analysts who received 3 or more votes, but only 11 could be featured because one of them—Vipul Prasad, who tracks metals at Morgan Stanley—did not get his employer’s permission to be profiled.

Last year, Morgan Stanley’s Sameer Baisiwala couldn’t be featured for the same reason. In terms of research houses, Kotak Securities walked away with the highest number of votes (16), followed by CLSA (12), and Citigroup (10). And in terms of sectors, oil & gas landed the maximum votes (17), followed by banking (16), and metals (15).

Strategy (8), pharma (7), and telecom (6) were some other highscoring sectors. Given that analysts are a research firm’s most precious resources, Business Today is grateful to these firms for their generous cooperation.

We are also beholden to the fund managers who took time off their busy schedules to participate in our poll.