KGS-Alpha Capital Markets has expanded has boosted its CMBS trading team with the addition of Jeff Lewis, Kyla Wichser and Andrew Noonan. It has also brought on board a new chief strategist, Kamal Abdullah.
Lewis, who leads the CMBS team, worked for 17 years at Salomon Brothers/Citigroup and then headed the CMBS trading effort at Barclays Capital, ICP Capital and most recently Citadel Securities.
Wichser and Noonan join Lewis on the trading desk. Wichser, a Bear Stearns alum, traded secondary CMBS with Lewis at ICP Capital and Citadel. Noonan specializes in structuring and pricing CMBS loans and previously worked at GE Capital, Eurohypo and Citadel.
Abdullah has over 17 years of research and trading experience across a spectrum of fixed-income sectors. He is charged with building a strategy team to serve the firm’s institutional client base.
Before joining the firm, Abdullah was head of RMBS and CMBS research at Citadel. He began his financial career at Salomon Brothers and subsequently spent ten years at Lehman Brothers where he traded mortgages and was active in mortgage research. Kamal then joined Merrill Lynch where he served four years as a client-facing strategist.
KGS-Alpha was established in 2010 and has offices in New York, Boston, San Francisco, Boca Raton, Chicago, Reston, and St. Louis.