Buy, sell, or hold: These 16 rising stars of Wall Street research are making bold calls in a frothy stock market

Morgan Stanley

Sector: Softlines retail and brands

Years before Straton became Morgan Stanley's top softlines retail and brand analyst, she was the editor of her high-school newspaper. 

The job had more in common with her current role than you might think: Both involved asking a lot of questions and finding novel ways to answer them. "I view a lot of what I do as an investigative job," she said.

This June is Straton's 10th year at Morgan Stanley. She started at the company after graduating from Duke University, working in equity capital markets and investment banking before becoming an equity analyst.

For Straton, covering some of the biggest names in retail and consumer brands, from retailers like Abercrombie & Fitch to footwear brands like Nike, requires more than just asking company executives questions. She told BI that she's always looking for new sources of data that might tell her clients how companies are performing. 

For example, she developed a model to predict Nike's revenue. Though the shoe giant reports only once a quarter, some of its suppliers in Asia update investors each month. Straton saw an opportunity to scour that information for data that could give her hints about how Nike might perform in its next earnings report. Working with colleagues around the globe, she figured out which data points were the best predictors for her model.

"I love that it's a very freeing approach to how you think about things as opposed to being more boxed in," she told BI. "I really love that about the job."

— Alex Bitter 

Jefferies

Sector: Consumer

Earlier this year, Helgans downgraded Ulta, the cosmetics retailer, to a "hold" for Jefferies.

Her reason? Though an executive from the retailer had talked about a slowdown in the beauty industry, Helgans knew plenty of similar brands were doing just fine. At Jefferies, Helgans covers major beauty brands and some of the retailers that sell them. 

"Because I covered the industry so closely, I was like, 'This isn't really what's going on,'" she said. "I could parse out what was company-specific versus what was actually a category slowdown."

Helgans has been at Jefferies since 2017. Her early work involved tracking the pet-food maker Freshpet. She started her current role in 2022.

Outside work, Helgans enjoys snowboarding and, more recently, spending time with her 17-month-old son.

But she also enjoys her work because she's as much a customer as she is an analyst of many of the brands she covers. Visiting stores and seeing how brands present themselves to consumers is a key part of her job. 

And you won't just find her at a shopping mall in suburbia: Helgans told BI that she loves to travel around the world to see how the companies she covers are doing, from company headquarters in Europe to stores that cater to China's growing middle class.

"There is something nice about being able to cover a sector that you participate in," she said.

— Alex Bitter

Citi

Sector: Financials

Gerlinger knew he was taking a risk. In the early weeks of last year's regional-banking crisis, he issued a buy rating on Western Alliance with a price target of $65 after its share price had plummeted to just under $32.

"I stuck my neck out pretty far because people were assuming that banks were going to fall left and right," Gerlinger, 31, said.

He admitted it was scary, but he had spent his college years working at a regional bank while balancing classes. Gerlinger, then a managing director at Hovde Group, knew Western Alliance had sticky deposits. The bet paid off: In January, Western Alliance peaked at $70.11 and now trades at about $59.

The Minnesota native has covered financials his entire career. The financial crisis of 2008 sparked his interest in the sector in high school. His father lost his job and used his severance package to day trade. They spent much of their time together watching Jim Cramer on CNBC.

Since Silicon Valley Bank's collapse in March 2023, there has been an explosion of interest in Gerlinger's work. In October, he joined Citi as a vice president and hit the ground running, initiating coverage of 16 banks in under 60 days. 

Despite New York Community Bank's recent turmoil, he thinks regional banks, especially First Horizon Corp. and Popular Inc., are widely undervalued. 

"Banks are a utility to some extent," he said. "If you're looking at a trading and holdings opportunity, there's going to be years where they do better than tech."

— Hayley Cuccinello 

Goldman Sachs

Sector: Power and utilities

If covering power and utilities companies sounds boring, think again.

With transformations in the sector coming at an electric pace — the shift to renewable resources; the advent of vast, energy-consuming data centers; and the upgrades to our national-power-grid structure — the arena is undergoing a rapid evolution, making it an exciting space to keep track of.

"We think that these companies are in a really unique position to contribute to that energy transition and sort of build a grid of the future," Davenport, 30, told BI, adding that they could "power demand growth that we expect to see over the next few years" in a cleaner, more reliable, and affordable way.

One area where Davenport's calls have broken ranks with other analysts covering the space: She believes that power demand will increase beyond the analyst consensus. She recently helped publish a report tying power demand to the surging advent of data centers. "It's sort of that thematic shift, that bullish view on power demand, that has been one of our more out-of-consensus calls from the start," she said.

Before transitioning to her current focus on power and utility firms, Davenport spent nearly seven years covering the oil and gas sector. The space she's in now, which is rapidly ballooning, is ripe with opportunities to learn and to meet new stakeholders, she said — and that keeps the job interesting.

Outside the day-to-day scope of her role, Davenport is on a committee for the research group's Women's Network.

Though Davenport said she wants to continue ramping up coverage of the power and utilities sector, she also wants to inspire the next generation of professionals in her field. "There's also the driving of internal progress and leading by example to help those coming up behind me to navigate the world of equity research," she said.

— Reed Alexander

BofA Securities

Sector: Apparel and footwear brands

Heading into the consumer-trends-focused ICR Conference in January, Crocs shares were trading below $90, down 20% from their December 2023 highs. Investors were worried about the strength of the consumer and the longevity of the brand's popularity.

Nardone had just started covering the company as an apparel and footwear analyst at Bank of America, and he believed the market was too negative on the stock. So he set an exceedingly bullish price target of $128 and touted his upbeat outlook at the conference.

"We had high conviction that this was one of the most compelling opportunities in our space," he said. 

And he was right. Since the conference, the stock is up 42% and trades around $148. Nardone has updated his target to $160.

It's one of many calls that Nardone, who's covered the apparel and footwear space since 2021, has nailed. As the director of coverage in the sector for Bank of America, Nardone covers nine stocks, including Ralph Lauren, Skechers, American Eagle, and Levi Strauss. 

Nardone, who grew up in Westchester County, New York, said his competitiveness and the time-management skills he developed as a manager for the men's basketball team at Boston College have contributed to his success.

He started his career working for Bank of America's risk-management team out of college, but after networking with different departments, he figured equity research would be a better fit for him. He started listening in on the team's daily calls before landing a job with them.

"It seemed like the dream job for me," he said.  

— William Edwards

Jefferies

Sector: Discount and specialty retail

Tarlowe is always on the hunt for discounts.

The Jefferies lead equity analyst for discount and specialty retail said one of his preferred leading indicators to judge a company's stock performance is the amount of promotional activity in stores and online.

"If I go to the Abercrombie store that's just across the street from here, what do I see? I don't really see that many products on markdown," he said. "Sometimes you see markdowns go up, and that's a bad sign for sales and margins."

The Rutgers graduate, who studied mathematics and economics, said this type of consumer-facing data was key to helping him pick Abercrombie & Fitch early. Its share price tripled in 2023 and has doubled this year so far.

Large retailers like Walmart, Costco, and Target are among the Fortune 50, which means their businesses can be bellwethers for the US and worldwide consumer economy.

Tarlowe said he finds big-box retail's macroeconomic impact interesting and uses publicly available data sources and Jefferies' proprietary models to inform his analysis.

Tarlowe was also ahead of Walmart's upward price trend in recent quarters, thanks in part to his deep dive into the retail giant's adoption of AI.

"They're planning to add $130 billion of sales over the next five years on a flat head count," he said. "AI and automation are going to be absolutely critical to their evolution."

These interdisciplinary skills have helped Tarlowe thrive at Jefferies, a firm that has grown considerably since he first joined as an intern. 

"There's been a lot of growth and it's been really great to be a part of that," he said.

 — Dominick Reuter

Mizuho Americas

Sector: Consumer hardlines and broadlines

Bellinger, a Mizuho Americas director and senior analyst, loves working with numbers and finding unconventional data sources.

But when it comes to turning that information into something his investor clients can use, simplicity is key.

"People find it interesting if you can boil it down to one chart or one line: Here's what these closings mean, or this is what this store footprint delta means," he said, referring to the net change in the square footage of a retailer's physical locations. "That's incredibly helpful." 

Bellinger has made notable calls for a number of firms over the years, including MKM Partners, Wolfe Research, Citi, and Oppenheimer. He joined Mizuho in September.

 Whether he's mapping out Home Depot and Lowe's locations in the country's highest-earning neighborhoods or tracking down which members at a closing Sam's Club will join a Costco instead, he looks well beyond financial statements to glean insights about a stock's future performance. 

In addition to sound fundamentals, the Fordham University-trained CPA also keeps an ear to social media to get ahead of the occasional revenue beat —  like when sports fans head to Dick's Sporting Goods after their team wins a championship.

Meanwhile, Bellinger's biggest win to date — a bet last year on the pet-product supplier Chewy — was the result of not just knowing the numbers but talking to investors on the Street and knowing what they're not saying. 

"If everyone's looking at the same thing, it's already baked in," he said. "There might be a whisper number that's out there that's very different."

— Dominick Reuter

Baird

Sector: Medical technologies

Unlike those who've mapped out their Wall Street careers from early on, Rescott didn't know he wanted to work in markets until halfway through college. By that point, many of his peers had already secured finance internships.

To play catch-up, Rescott attended Vanderbilt University's one-year MS Finance program, where he built financial models and got Microsoft Excel down to a science.

Rescott was far from a science expert, but as an equity researcher covering biomedical devices for Canaccord Genuity, he had to learn quickly. In the eight years since, he jumped to Truist and then Baird, where he anchors its medical-technology coverage.

Instead of convincing clients to follow his "buy" or "sell" calls, Rescott said he tries to educate his audience with exclusive insights that he gathers by attending medical-device conferences and talking with physicians.

"If I can offer something to somebody that's new and different, that helps them make a decision — whether they agree with me or not — if I can influence the way in which they operate in their role, that, I think, technically, is what I really care about," Rescott said.

"You like to have stocks moving in the direction in which you suggest they should move," he added. "But at the end of the day, there's only so much that I can control from that aspect."

Medtech stocks have been mixed this year, but Rescott still sees opportunities. His top picks are Boston Scientific, which he sees benefiting from a new product cycle, and Intuitive Surgical, which trades at a high but justifiable valuation thanks to its entrenched competitive advantages.

– James Faris

Leerink Partners

Sector: Biotechnology

After graduating from Brown University in 2016 with a degree in biomedical engineering, Khurshid took a consulting job helping biotech firms. In one client meeting, he was struck by how much the company's executives valued the opinion of an analyst whose report they had in front of them.

The experience inspired Khurshid to leave consulting and go into equity research.

"Someone who wasn't in the room, their research report was actually having an impact on what this company was thinking about and ultimately deciding to do," he said. "And I thought that was really cool, that an external, objective voice was really having an influence on how a biotech company operated."

Now, Khurshid is the director of biotech equity research at Leerink, where he uses his five years of consulting experience to help him cover Fusion Pharmaceuticals, Point Biopharma, and Rain Oncology. He's now expanding the number of firms under his purview. 

Khurshid said his most impressive call so far was on Fusion Pharmaceuticals, which he started covering on in November 2022 with a rating of "outperform." The stock traded at about $2 at the time, and Khurshid was confident that the new type of radiotherapy for cancer patients the company was working on would eventually boost its share price. The stock climbed more than 350% before AstraZeneca announced in March that they would buy Fusion for about $21 a share. That's about a 900% return from the time Khurshid started coverage of the company.

"They were one of the first companies doing this new type of radiotherapy," he said. "Although the market wasn't appreciating it yet, I thought that that leadership position would prove valuable and would ultimately bear fruit." 

— William Edwards 

TD Cowen

Sector: Lease-to-own consumer finance

When his employer, Credit Suisse, collapsed last year, Nguyen's career path was tested. But instead of getting left in the lurch, the consumer-finance analyst used it as an opportunity to take control of his career. 

 Nguyen landed at TD Cowen in July, and in March, he became a lead analyst focusing on the lease-to-own sector, a subset within consumer finance that allows low-income buyers to finance high-priced discretionary items such as furniture and electronics. 

"This is traditionally one of the spaces that we had not looked closely at," Nguyen, a Bates College alum, told BI. "It's adjacent to consumer finance, but it's also a slightly different space" — which, he said, is "why I set my eyes on this industry." 

As only one of a handful of analysts specializing in the lease-to-own space on Wall Street, Nguyen helps his broader consumer-finance team fill in gaps in coverage across the whole credit spectrum. Knowing what's happening in the subprime space can signal potential market moves among nonprime lenders, credit-card issuers, and small-business lenders, he said. 

Unlike most retail analysts in the subsector, he also knows the regulatory landscape. From the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's regulations to state laws regarding financial products, Nguyen said he understands how regulatory actions affect lease-to-own companies. 

Nguyen said the sector has been depressed over the past few years because high-interest rates have slowed consumer spending. But his analysis suggests this may be the year the industry pivots to positive growth, and he's betting on players such as Upbound and Progressive to perform well.

— Bianca Chan

Stifel Financial

Sector: Gaming & Leisure

Stantial's family, some of whom have worked in research and trading, shaped his interest in markets from a young age. His family helped him invest small amounts of money in Electronic Arts and Microsoft when he was younger, which broadened his interest in the industry even more.

The Colgate University alum landed his first job in equity research at SunTrust Robinson Humphrey, now known as Truist Securities. Four years later, he joined Stifel. 

Stantial, who was recently promoted to managing director, covers 12 stocks within the broader gaming, lodging, and leisure ecosystem. The companies he covers include Vail Resorts and the sports-betting company DraftKings — which he also uses.

"If you're going to cover consumer stocks, it's always helpful to be an actual consumer of the product," he said. "And I do, for better or worse, enjoy sports betting."

Stantial has gained recognition for guiding investors through casino closures during COVID-19. 

"I was vocal that casinos would be an early reopening beneficiary due to the tax revenues generated," he said. "That proved accurate and the defining trade in our sectors for several quarters."

One way Stantial stands out is that he incorporates proprietary data into what he knows about the gaming and leisure industry. To gain more insight into International Game Technology, he requested lottery sales figures from US states, which helped him track monthly trends in lottery sales across the country.

"I think what really sets you apart, or at least what set me apart in some ways, is a focus on building out more proprietary dataset to then tie with your insights than your knowledge of the sector," he said.

— Tiara White 

Goldman Sachs

Sector: Leisure  

Dove loves being on the front lines of the travel industry, whether it's taking cruises on Royal Caribbean ships or visiting theme parks like Six Flags or SeaWorld. 

She's on the hunt to learn what makes each destination appealing, scouring new restaurants and touring cruise lines' private islands. Part of that includes talking to employees and travel agents to assess companies' business goals and strategies and asking consumers to share their opinions about various products.

But Dove isn't an undercover travel reviewer for Fodor's Travel Guide. She's a research analyst at Goldman Sachs, where she has covered the leisure sector since last year.

"The best equity researchers aren't just heads down in Excel. They're also great communicators and they have great relationships," she said. "It's that continuous dialogue, the sharing of ideas, the kind of constant feedback loop that I really love the most."

Dove, 30, joined Goldman Sachs in 2016. She's a relative newcomer to the leisure sector, but an early bet she made on rental cars — she said that pricing would normalize after a pandemic-era boom — quickly helped her establish credibility, she said.

For Dove, falling into a career in financial services was unexpected. While studying abroad in Spain, she became infatuated with the "Wall Street Unplugged" podcast, which exposed her to a lexicon of new terms like "EBITDA" and "private equity" for the first time. "Little did I know then that I had stumbled across my dream career," she said. She started working in Goldman's London office before relocating to New York about six years ago.

Her advice to aspiring research analysts is to be curious and positive on the job. "I really think that passion and drive goes a long way," she said.

— Reed Alexander

Leerink Partners

Sector: Medical devices and technology

Kratky's young career underwent a major shift in March 2020 — and it wasn't remote work.

After gigs at Nasdaq and B. Riley Securities, Kratky landed at what was then SVB Leerink in 2018, where he covered immunology and inflammation-focused drug companies. He then spent a year at a hedge fund before boomeranging back to Leerink in March 2021. He's now a senior research analyst at the healthcare investment bank.

That back and forth was fruitful, though, as Kratky learned the buy side of the business. The Colgate University graduate thinks he's a better analyst for it because he now understands how readers of his research think.

"The stock calls won't always go my way," Kratky said. "If I can help clients learn something or teach them something about something that may not be on their radar already, that's an incredibly important way for me to be valuable on the sell side."

But lately, Kratky's calls have gone his way. All eight of the outperform-rated medtech stocks Leerink has covered since October have outperformed the S&P 500 and their industry index.

The medtech industry is experiencing rapid change, particularly with the advent of GLP-1 drugs that treat obesity and diabetes. But instead of dwelling on risks, Kratky is searching for catalysts.

"There are a number of different product launches that are happening within our universe in the next couple years and beyond that are going to be very much an opportunity for investors to see these stories start to inflect and accelerate growth," Kratky said.

One of those opportunities is Tandem Diabetes Care, whose shares have risen 156% in the past six months thanks to a better-than-anticipated product launch. Kratky believes it may have even more upside.

— James Faris

JPMorgan

Sector: North American Utilities

Sunderland's love for data and analysis has been a long-standing theme in his life. Having grown up in "a reading household" and majored in classics at Dartmouth, the VP at JPMorgan is a book fiend. He has been tracking every book he reads in Excel since he was 10. The 25 years' worth of data in his spreadsheet includes each book's name, author, genre, page count, and date finished.

"I find it very interesting to look back on that list and see the trends from year to year, which often mark different life milestones," he said.

Sunderland became familiar with the utilities industry while researching it at hedge fund Longbow Capital Partners. "I learned the modeling process from a very detailed perspective," he said. 

Sunderland now covers 14 utility companies across electric, gas, water, and hybrid power subsectors. Most are small and middle-cap names, like Southwest Gas and Avangrid, which he says helps give him a niche perspective on sub-sector themes. One of his biggest calls this year is a testament to that advantage.

In a 2024 outlook note published last year, Sunderland said Canadian utility companies Fortis and Emera would underperform in the year ahead. Though he's been proven right (their prices have fallen by about half a percentage point and more than 5% year to date, respectively), Sunderland said the note got a lot of attention — a mix of agreement and pushback. 

"You do have to have the courage of conviction in all of this because we're probably not doing our job if every change we make or every call we make is being cheered by everyone," he said.

— Emmalyse Brownstein

KBW Stifel

Sector: Real-estate technology

Tomasello didn't originally plan to become an equity research analyst but now knows the job suits him. The role draws on his skills as an analyst, writer, and savvy networker -- a talent he developed while studying theater in high school and college

"That stage presence and performance mentality was always a very transferable skill set in making connections and also learning the importance of storytelling," Tomasello said.

Tomasello now leads a pioneering practice at the boutique investment bank Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, covering real-estate technology as an independent industry rather than falling under the more general real-estate or tech umbrella.

In 2017, he began a two-year quest to convince KBW that real-estate technology was the next big story to tell and that the firm should launch its own coverage of the sector. By 2019, as WeWork's attempted IPO brought real-estate tech to the world stage, Tomasello was facing the challenge of valuing the industry's new business models with few clean comparables.

Traditionally, real-estate technology firms like CoStar and Zillow have been covered by technology analysts.

Tomasello homed in on the peculiarities of the real-estate industry by publishing a series called "Commission Impossible" about the real-estate commission structure in 2023, before the settlement of a lawsuit against the National Association of Realtors upended the laws around agent commissions earlier this year. His work on that series led to his prediction late last year that potential rule changes would buoy CoStar. When the settlement was announced in March, CoStar was the only related business whose stock price rose.

— Alex Nicoll

JPMorgan

Sector: Biotechnology

Romero has known she wanted to make a difference in healthcare since she was 10 years old, when her grandmother was found to have Alzheimer's disease. Her weekly Sunday visit sparked an interest in understanding the human brain and the disorders and diseases that could affect it.

She went on to major in biological basis of behavior at the University of Pennsylvania and interned at a biotech company called Genentech, which she says inspired her to want to work on the business side of the industry rather than pursue a doctorate.

"How much we know about the body and how these diseases and disorders manifest themselves is constantly evolving and changing," she said. "And it's really the biotech companies that are at the forefront of pioneering a lot of that change."

Romero is now covering some of the very companies that exist to treat neurological conditions like the one her grandmother had. As a senior analyst researcher at JPMorgan, she focuses on smaller and mid-cap companies like Xenon Pharmaceuticals and Neumora Therapeutics. She sees her role as helping investors better understand how drug innovations may help patients.

One of her most exciting recent calls was on Cytokinetics. In November, she accurately predicted a positive outcome from a key set of clinical trials, and by early January the stock had jumped about 200%. She now strongly recommends Xenon because of its work on treatment-resistant epilepsy.

She told BI that mentoring the more junior members of her team was one of her favorite aspects of her job. Her approachable leadership style encourages open discussions and means people regularly bring her fresh perspectives, she added. "I think that's when the great ideas come," she said, "and if I can just nurture that, that's always my goal on a day-to-day basis."

 — Emmalyse Brownstein

Correction: June 6, 2024 — An earlier version of this story misstated the stock that Jefferies' analyst Ashley Helgans had downgraded earlier this year. It was Ulta, not Olaplex.