Cowen & Co. made a number of senior hires across the board, including in its quantitative trading, electronic products and derivatives groups. Doug Rivelli, previously co-CEO of Pragma Securities, joins as a managing director and co-head of quantitative trading. He co-heads the group with Stuart Gould.
In its newly formed electronic products group, four hires join from Newedge Group. They are Mark Viani, managing director, Jay Knopf, director, Robert McHeffey, director, and Jessica Oliveras-Yu, vice president. The group is charged with creating and selling various electronic trading platforms and products.
In institutional equity options, Cowen hires John Longo and Jason Megson as managing directors. Longo and Megson were most recently at Oppenheimer & Co., where they were co-heads of equity derivatives sales and trading. Additionally, Cowen recently formed a convertible securities desk, hiring Iain Kennedy as director in sales from Barclay’s Capital. He joins a team that includes Michael Colucci, a director and senior convertibles trader, Mike Tarro, a director and trader and Omar Brown, a director in sales. The new hires all report to Thomas O’Mara, Cowen’s head of equity derivatives and convertibles. The hires in quantitative trading report to both O’Mara and John O’Donoghue, who heads equities.
Allan Heye joins Jefferies as a managing director in the firm’s portfolio sales trading group in London. Heye spent the last 14 years in portfolio trading sales at Credit Suisse as a director. Prior to that, he was co-head of Matif Trading at BZW in Paris and head of German-listed derivatives trading at BZW Frankfurt.
Lee Shavel was appointed chief financial officer and executive vice president of corporate strategy at Nasdaq OMX. Shavel joins Nasdaq after spending 18 years with Bank of America Merrill Lynch, where he served as Americas head of financial institutions investment banking. Prior to Bank of America’s acquisition of Merrill Lynch, he served as head of finance, securities and technology and global chief operating officer for the financial institutions group at Merrill.
Shavel has advised on many notable securities industry transactions, including the sale of the New York Mercantile Exchange to CME Group, the sale of the International Securities Exchange to Deutsche Boerse, the acquisition of BRUT by Nasdaq and the merger of Archipelago and REDIBook. In addition he has advised on IPOs for Nasdaq, NYMEX, ISE, MF Global, Instinet and Archipelago. Prior to Merrill, Shavel worked at Citicorp as an Associate in the Financial Institutions Group. Former Nasdaq CFO David Warren will remain at the exchange and serve as special advisor to chief executive Bob Greifeld.
Brad Kurtzman joined Citigroup as head of U.S. equity derivatives trading. Until January, Kurtzman held a similar position in the brokerage division of the giant hedge fund Citadel. Before joining Citadel in 2009, Kurtzman was employed at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
