Domestic and International Institutional Equity Sales

Institutional equity sales professionals are dedicated to helping our global institutional investor clients identify superior investment opportunities. Our 36 sales professionals, who have extensive experience with the firm, believe that personal contact and the exchange of ideas are essential to success in the capital markets. Group presentations, meetings, field trips, and seminars are among the tools that facilitate the flow of information between corporate issuers and investors. We organized more than 250 investor trips globally in 2009, resulting in 2,000-plus one-on-one meetings between institutional investors and corporate management teams.

William Blair & Company first established a European presence in the institutional marketplace in the 1960s, and ever since has provided international investors with access to beneficial information and investment opportunities not readily available in their local markets.

We maintain offices or affiliates in Chicago, Boston, Hartford, London, New York, San Francisco, Tokyo, and Zurich.

Our salespeople draw on the ideas of our highly esteemed Equity Research Department, whose mission is to generate superior investment ideas and value-added insights through independent, in-depth research of quality growth companies across the market-cap spectrum (but focused on small- and midcap stocks), with a longer-term orientation. Our research universe totals over 400 quality growth companies in 5 industry sectors: business services, consumer, financial services, health care, and technology.

From June 15-17, Institutional Sales and Trading, along with the Equity Research Group, co-sponsored William Blair & Company's 30th Annual Growth Stock Conference. The 818 clients who attended the conference were rewarded with presentations from 199 companies from a wide spectrum of industries and market capitalizations. Attendees had ample opportunity to meet informally with the management teams of the participating companies; more than 3,100 one-on-one sessions took place over the three-day conference. Our conference continues to attract presenters from the most senior ranks of management–more than three-quarters of the presenters in 2010 were COOs, presidents, CEOs, and chairmen.