BANK OF AMERICA CORPORATION Raj Shah, head of sell-side research and analytics at StarMine, a Thomson Reuters data research company, said there had been a marked move away from covering as broad a range of companies as possible.
Though banks continue to provide the lion's share of research used by the buy side, a shrinking of their investment banking divisions to cut costs in the face of a slump in trading revenues and tougher capital requirements has led to tighter coverage.
StarMine data shows the number of analysts around the world fell by 5 percent in the period.
"Institutional investors are becoming ever more discerning, forcing research departments to make tough decisions about which stocks and sectors to cover and invariably driving them to rethink not only the size of their departments but their research models," Shah said.
"Winning analysts were those who differentiated, or had a mix of names that would go down as well as up, and scored well for issuing estimates that were timely, significantly different from consensus, and directionally more accurate than consensus."
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Buy-side firms also wanted more company-specific insight rather than the macroeconomic and political views that had been in demand in the previous financial year.
As such, winners tended to have deep knowledge of the companies and sectors they were covering, Shah said.
For example, Cormac Leech at Liberum, named by StarMine as Europe's overall best stockpicker, has spent more than a decade in bank equity research.
Regardless of experience, the job of all analysts was made more complicated by an uncertain economic environment.
In the year to March 31, only 57 percent of analysts generated positive returns for clients, StarMine said, down from 59 percent a year earlier. That figure is still well off the pre-financial crisis peak in 2007, when 65 percent made money for clients.
Deutsche Bank's (>> Deutsche Bank AG) analysts won more awards than any other brokerage in Asia, Europe and the United States, coming ahead of UBS (>> UBS AG) and Bank of America Merrill Lynch (>> Bank of America Corp).
Unlike other industry awards based on surveys or votes, StarMine gives an objective measure of analysts' performance by assessing the accuracy of their earnings estimates and recommendations based on the returns of their buy or sell picks relative to industry benchmarks.
(Editing by David Goodman)
By Clare Hutchison
