The Super Analysts

What this book actually teaches

The Super Analysts (2000) by Andrew Leeming, a Managing Director at ING Barings and head of Asia regional banking research, is a practitioner interview book in the tradition of Jack Schwager's Market Wizards series — focused on equity analysts and fund managers rather than traders, and drawn from the global markets rather than primarily the US. Leeming interviews leading investors and analysts across markets in the US, London, Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Frankfurt, giving the book an international scope that distinguishes it from most investment practitioner literature of its era.

The book's organizing question is how the best equity analysts and fund managers actually do their work — their research process, how they form and update views, how they handle uncertainty in financial models, and what they look for in management teams, business models, and competitive dynamics that less successful practitioners overlook. Each interview reveals both the subject's analytical methodology and the habits of mind that sustain performance over time. The practitioner format provides a window into expert judgment that no how-to guide can replicate: the specifics of how a given analyst has approached a particular decision-making problem in real conditions, under real uncertainty.

Recurring themes across the interviews include the primacy of understanding business model economics before building financial projections, the importance of management quality assessment as a predictive variable, skepticism toward consensus estimates as a source of alpha, and the discipline of maintaining an explicit variant view (a clear thesis about how current market pricing is wrong and why) rather than tracking consensus to avoid being wrong alone. Several interviewees emphasize the value of channel checks and primary research — conversations with customers, suppliers, and competitors — as the source of edge over analysts who rely primarily on company management guidance and published financial statements.

The Asia-Pacific orientation of Leeming's professional background gives disproportionate coverage to analysts specializing in Asian markets — particularly Japan, Hong Kong, and Singapore — which was a timely focus given the aftermath of the 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis. The interviews conducted in that context capture practitioners reflecting on how they did or did not anticipate the crisis, providing a post-mortem of institutional equity research during a major market dislocation.

The weaknesses are those of the interview-book genre applied to investment analysis. The quality of insight varies across subjects — some interviews are substantive and specific, others more general. The 2000 publication date means the market and regulatory context has shifted substantially; the pre-Sarbanes-Oxley information environment in which many of these analysts operated (including analyst-company relationships that have since been restricted) is no longer the environment readers will work in. The global markets coverage, while a strength in scope, means no single market receives the depth of coverage that a narrower focus would permit.

For investors and analysts interested in how elite equity research practitioners actually think — their research process, their approach to uncertainty, and the habits of mind that distinguish sustained outperformers from the consensus — this book provides an international practitioner perspective that remains instructive despite its age.

Read next

About Andrew Leeming

Read more from Andrew Leeming and explore the full bibliography on ClearValue Books.