Jefferies has appointed Desh Peramunetilleke as head of Global Microstrategy Product in Equity Research.

He is based in the firm’s Hong Kong office. He heads up the newly-formed Microstrategy team, which includes Mahesh Kedia, Shrikant Kale, Barnis Yuen, Jeffrey Tong and Jenny Wu.

Microstrategy is a bottom-up product that uses company fundamentals to create insights into markets and sectors, and combines it with top-down macro trends to develop systematic investment strategies, diagnostic screens and proprietary risk scores for clients all over the world and across investment styles.

“We are very excited to have Desh join Jefferies’ leading equities platform,” commented Peter Forlenza, Jefferies’ global head of Equities.

“We are substantially expanding our Asian equities platform given our outlook on the Asian regional markets and the opportunity. Jefferies is perhaps singular in the industry currently to have the intent and ability to enlist such impressive teams in Asia.”

Peramunetilleke was most recently head of Microstrategy at CLSA and has more than 20 years of equity research experience.