Cantor Fitzgerald has expanded its whole mortgage loan sales and trading team with the appointment of Gary Wang and Karl Partch as managing directors.
Wang and Partch both join Cantor from Wunderlich Securitties and will focus on portfolio disposition, evaluation, and structuring advisory. They will be based in Los Angeles, and will report to Cass Tokarski, senior managing director, head of mortgage and asset-backed securities sales and trading.
"We view whole loans as the next scalable trade, as investors start to look for alternatives to a shrinking legacy non-agency RMBS market," Tokarski said in a statement published Monday. “There is less and less going on there, aside from the larger liquidation lists seen from time to time,” he added in a telephone interview.
Wang and Partch's background and industry contacts are a tremendous asset to Cantor, and Cantor expects them to strengthen its ability to cover clients in California, one of the biggest mortgage markets in the U.S., Tokarski said.
He said that Cantor has ambitions to eventually originate and securitize residential mortgages.
At Wunderlich, Wang served as senior vice president of loan trading. Prior to this, he oversaw the conforming conduit trading desk at WaMu Capital Corp. Earlier, he held a senior position at Countrywide Securities, where he traded CRA and whole loans.
Partch served as senior vice president of loan trading at Wunderlich. In addition, he has held a number of senior trading positions at Countrywide Capital Markets and Bank of America Merrill Lynch, where he bought and sold custom whole loan and mortgage backed securities portfolios and managed fixed rate and adjustable rate mortgages.
The duo replace Ted Owens, who left Cantor for JP Morgan in September 2014. The firm created its whole loan sales and trading team in 2009. Owens joined as a manging director in August 2010.
