Miller Tabak Roberts Securities (MTR) launched its ABS / MBS unit with eight structured product veterans.
The unit will first focus on secondary sales and trading of non-agency prime, Alt-A and subprime RMBS, CMBS and consumer and industrial ABS. The new department is likely to expand into CDOs of MBS/ABS, and agency RMBS.
MTR now trades over a dozen credit, convertible and equity asset classes across four integrated sales and trading operations.
The new unit is led by Managing Director Sachin Jhangiani. Jhangiani most recently led the West Coast-based structured products sales team at Banc of America Securities (BofA) and before that was BofA’s head of origination and servicing sales in New York.
Before joining BofA, Jhangiani spent a number of years at Lehman Brothers, where he transitioned from trading agency MBS to sales.
Joining Jhangiani as department founding senior staff, all as senior vice presidents, are traders Sean Grettum and Aaron Read, institutional salespeople Earl Rix, Matthew Kulekofsky and Mohammed Noorali, and RMBS credit strategist Stevan Stevanovic.
Grettum, Kulekofsky and Noorali all most recently held similar roles at BofA. Rix started his career in MBS and ABS at Salomon Brothers and was most recently at Piper Jaffray. Read comes from Blue Mountain Capital Management and before that was a portfolio manager at BlackRock. Stevanovic was most recently an MBS and ABS research analyst at Credit Suisse.
Rounding out the department is Charles Joyce, recently of Citigroup, as assistant vice president for MBS/ABS trading and operations support.
“The seasoned professionals of our new MBS / ABS department are already generating high-quality markets and industry-leading strategy and insights,” MTR’s co-founder and CEO Robert Schoenthal said. “We are pleased to introduce MTR’s two-decade record of excellence in credit sales, trading and research to clients specialized in MBS and ABS. We are equally happy to offer to our established clients our new colleagues’ services in these critical asset classes.”