Name: John Leonard
Title: Global head of equities, UBS Global Asset Management
John Leonard oversees about $160 billion in stocks worldwide, depending on the day. A little back-of-the-envelope calculation shows you how ugly his recent paper statements probably looked. Stocks have seesawed in recent days -- Leonard spent much of that time taking advantage of cheap prices on the dips.
"We get paid to do what's hard to do--that's to stick your head up and buy when the market is too pessimistic and sell when it's too optimistic," says Leonard. He's betting recession fears are overblown, and has spent about a third of the cash hoard of one fund accumulating stocks in the past couple weeks. He's bought the stocks of battered biotech and medical device makers. He's also sold shares in big, integrated oil companies to buy smaller oil services and drillers.
"Anybody can tell you 10 reasons why there are problems," he says, "but it's just too pessimistic here."
