The buy side says: “Scott’s reports are must-reading.”
Morgan Stanley’s Scott Davis ascends one level to make his first appearance in the winner’s circle, which for the past ten years had been occupied by Jeffrey Sprague. (Sprague left Citi in February to start his own firm, Vertical Research Partners of Stamford, Connecticut.) Davis, 42, receives high marks for his January launch of a quarterly equipment-distributors survey and daily e-mail updates. Other boosters single out a February upgrade of Caterpillar from underweight to overweight, at $50.13, citing rising revenue. By late August shares of the Peoria, Illinois–based manufacturer of power-generating systems, engines and turbines had catapulted 30 percent, to $65.16, and blown past the sector by 25 percentage points. Davis, who graduated from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania’s Lehigh University in 1990 with a bachelor’s degree in economics, joined Morgan Stanley in 1996 after stints at Merrill Lynch and Capital Analysts. “Scott provides unbiased research, focusing on what truly makes companies prosper over the long term,” says one aficionado.
