Institutional Investor’s tenth annual All-China Research Team ranks the region’s top research providers, as determined by mainland and international investors. This year, more than 4,800 investment professionals at nearly 1,000 institutions showed a clear preference for domestic firms, resulting in a major shakeup of last year’s leaderboard.
Huatai Securities — which ranked sixth last year — leapt to the No. 1 spot in the 2019 ranking of the best research teams, edging 2018 incumbent CICC down to second place. GF Securities improved on its eleventh place ranking to finish third this year, while Guotai Junan Securities slipped one spot to fourth. The highest-ranking international firm was UBS, which placed fifth.
Voters rated the top firms across 25 industry and economic sectors to form the team ranking. Additionally, they separately ranked individual analysts in each sector to form an analyst-based leaderboard, which CICC topped for the eighth year in a row. Votes in both categories were weighted by each respondent’s Chinese equity assets under management.
In order to highlight the difference in perspectives between domestic and international investors, respondents were divided by location to produce additional rankings from each point of view. Each of these leaderboards, as well as an article on the results and the full methodology, can be viewed using the navigation bar at right.
To select the members of Institutional Investor’s tenth annual All-China Research Team, we solicited the opinions of more than 4,800 investment professionals at over 980 institutions.
This year, participants rated their top firms in each sector and then separately rated individual analysts or economists/strategists at those firms to create two distinct rankings for each sector. A numerical score was produced by weighting each vote by the respondent’s Chinese equity assets under management and the average rating awarded. Using those scores, ranks were determined. Firms/analysts were designated runners‐up when their scores came within 35 percent of the third-place scores.
In order to portray the difference in perspective between domestic and international investors, we divided respondents according to their location to produce two additional rankings: a mainland view and an international view.
In the international ranking voting for analysts in the quantitative sector was insufficient to produce results.
The individuals surveyed are kept confidential to ensure continuing cooperation. Voters are subject to eligibility requirements, and winners must achieve a minimum vote count. All ballots are subject to review by our Research Operations Group.