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Products June 8, 2011
CRT Expands Securitized Products Team with Acquisition
June 8, 2011 (PLANSPONSOR.com) - CRT Capital Group and Braver Stern Securities LLC announced that CRT has acquired Braver Stern’s institutional sales and trading platform.
Reported by Rebecca Moore
Braver Stern’s team of senior professionals, led by Joseph Valentine and Rus Margolin, will join CRT’s existing securitized products platform. The newly expanded group will focus on agency and non-agency residential and commercial mortgage-backed securities, asset-backed CDOs, and mortgage-backed pass-through securities.
According to the announcement, Joseph Valentine, who served as Head of Institutional Fixed Income Trading at Braver Stern, will join CRT as Co-Head of the Securitized Products Group along with Jeffry Mullins. Prior to joining Braver Stern, Valentine was a Managing Director at UBS for five years and spent 10 years at Bear Stearns in various mortgage-related roles.
Rus Margolin will serve as Head of Non-Agency Trading at CRT and will report to Jeffry Mullins. Before joining Braver Stern in 2008, Margolin was with UBS, where he worked on its non-agency collateralized mortgage obligation trading desk.
Following the transaction, Braver Stern will continue to serve its smaller institutional and high net worth client base, which the announcement said has been the hallmark of the firm since 1991.