Two members of the recently disbanded electronic market making group at Cowen & Company have landed at Wells Fargo Securities.
Ron Hooey, who ran the equities wholesaler group at Cowen, and Kevin Fong, a trading engineer, joined Wells last month. Both executives were part of a short-lived market making group at Cowen that was trying to make inroads in the wholesaling business. Cowan disbanded the two-year effort in August.
Hooey spent nearly two years at Cowen building up a business that sources say had several customers and was processing a few million shares per day. As a start-up wholesaler, Cowen serviced retail brokers and competed with such established players as Knight Capital Group, Citi/ATD and Citadel Securities.
Fong spent over a year at Cowen, having joined the firm in March 2011. A veteran of the market making business, Fong spent about 10 years with Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities and two years at its successor, Surge Trading, according to records of the Financial Industry Regulatory Association.
Members of the former Cowen group that have yet to land with a firm include Robert Falcone, a software developer who built Cowen’s market making system, and Matt Padala, a sales trader. Prior to joining Cowen, Falcone worked as a developer at Surge, according to LinkedIn, while Padala spent about five years at Madoff, according to FINRA.
