New York, NY – According to an article published in this week’s Wall Street Letter, Graham Copley, the former Global Head of Equity Research at HSBC, was recently hired by Australian investment bank, Macquarie Securities, to build up their U.S. equities division. Copley left HSBC in August of 2007.
Since Copley joined Macquarie last year, he has hired a head of sales and a small number of analysts. The Wall Street Letter reveals that Copley plans to hire between 30 and 40 analysts by the end of March covering six sectors, including utilities and energy.
The new Macquarie research team is expected to focus its efforts on producing deep industry research versus stock picking — a move that is consistent with what the buy-side seems to value most in recent years. However, we suspect that Copley will not eliminate BUY / SELL / HOLD Recommendations altogether.
A few years ago, Copley attempted this while at HSBC. Unfortunately, complaints from clients forced HSBC to reverse course adding their recommendations back to their research reports.
In addition, Copley is likely to leverage Macquarie’s international presence to produce a research product that is more global in nature.