Bloomberg Agency MBS & CRT Mortgage Summit

Alex is currently the head of structured credit at Squarepoint overseeing all structured credit related portfolio management, and trading. Before Squarepoint, He worked at Guggenheim Partners in Santa Monica as a trader focusing on resi credit. Earlier in his career, he focused mostly in structured products including NA RMBS, CLO, and Agency CMOs in various hedge fund trading roles. His educational background is in math and financial engineering.

Barath Sankaran is a member of the Mortgage and Structured Finance Team at Loomis, Sayles & Company. He is a co-portfolio manager for the dedicated agency MBS strategies and a co-agency MBS portfolio manager for the Loomis Sayles Core Plus Bond Fund. Additionally, Barath guides other product teams at the firm in the optimal sector allocation and portfolio implementation of agency MBS.

Barath joined Loomis Sayles in 2009 as an analyst on the Mortgage and Structured Finance Team, where he initially focused on non-agency RMBS and gradually expanded his role to agency MBS. Since 2011, Barath has been dedicated to the agency MBS effort with the goal of developing best-in-class investment capabilities. He was instrumental in creating the firm’s proprietary prepayment model and has led the creation of a fundamentally-driven relative value approach to investing in specified MBS pools. In 2018, Barath was promoted to portfolio manager. Prior to Loomis Sayles, he held multiple roles at Johnson & Johnson, where he was a member of the Information Management Leadership Development Program, a Six Sigma dashboard architect and later a business relationship lead for the consumer products division.

Barath earned a BS from Carnegie Mellon University and an MBA from the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a CFA® charterholder. Barath is fluent in German.

Eugene Belostotsky is the head of mortgage credit and ABS research at Citi. Prior to joining Citi, Eugene worked in structuring and trading roles at both sell-side and buy-side firms. Eugene holds a Bachelor of Science degree from MIT and a Master of Science degree from the London School of Economics.

Joe Sikoscow is a portfolio manager and co-head of the mortgage business at LMR partners. He is focused on relative value strategies across the mortgage spectrum from Agency TBAs to CRTs. Prior to LMR Partners, he worked at Fieldstreet Capital Management and prior to that, on the sell-side at Nomura & Deutsche Bank.

Jonathan Spitzer is a Managing Director and senior trader on the Agency Collateralized Mortgage Obligations (CMO) Trading at Santander US Capital Markets (SANCAP). Mr. Spitzer is responsible for the structuring and trading of GNMA/FNMA/FRE CMOs. Mr. Spitzer spent the last 4 years at Amherst Pierpont Securities (APS) and joined SANCAP in early 2023 after APS was acquired by Banco Santander. Prior to joining SANCAP/APS, Mr. Spitzer traded Mortgage Backed Securities and CMOs at RBC, BNP, and Citigroup. Mr. Spitzer holds a B.A. in Economics from the University of Michigan.

Kirill Krylov, Managing Director and Fixed Income Portfolio Strategist specializes in developing fixed income portfolio strategies for depository clients, public fund clients, central banks, insurance companies, and professional money managers. Prior to joining Baird in 2009, Kirill had been with RBC Capital Markets for 8 years. He has served in a variety of analytical and managerial roles (MBS Strategist, Agency sector analyst), and as a Head of the RBC Portfolio Strategy group. Kirill is well recognized in the industry and is frequently quoted in the financial press (e.g., Wall Street Journal). Prior to joining RBC Capital Markets, Mr. Krylov held a number of analytical / trading positions at Cargill Inc. He earned a bachelor’s degree as well as Ph.D. from the University of St. Petersburg, Russia, a Masters in Accounting and Financial Analysis from the University of St. Thomas and an MBA (concentration in Finance) from the University of Chicago.

Kathleen Pagliaro is Vice President of Single-Family Credit Risk Transfer, reporting to the Senior Vice President of Single-Family Capital Markets. She is responsible for implementing strategies to transfer credit risk associated with Fannie Mae’s Single-Family guaranty business to the capital markets and private investors. As Vice President, she leads the efforts for the new issuance execution of Fannie Mae’s flagship Connecticut Avenue Securities® (CAS) program. Under her leadership, Fannie Mae successfully restarted the CAS program in October 2021 after an 18-month pause.

Pagliaro previously served as Fannie Mae’s Director for Credit Risk, a cross-functional role that included supporting the advancement of the company’s credit risk transfer objectives and developing approaches to expand the CAS investor base. Prior to joining Fannie Mae in 2011, Pagliaro was an equities trader at FBR Capital Markets where she focused on the real estate sector.​

Pagliaro has a Bachelor of Science in business administration from Georgetown University.

Kevin joined Citadel in 2019 as a Senior Strategist focusing across Agency MBS products including TBA, Specified Pools, single-family and multi-family CMOs. Prior to Citadel, he ran similar strategies at Fieldstreet Capital Management, C12 Capital and Barclays. Kevin started his career within the Fixed Income group within Citi’s Alternative Investment Division in 2002. Kevin received his MS in quantitative finance from NYU’s Courant Institute and BA in Economics and Mathematics from Boston University.

Kesi Wang is a director and senior trader in the securitized product group at Bank of America. Kesi leads the Credit Risk Transfer (CRT) and Digital Infrastructure trading business, as well as CRE CLO and Conduit AAA trading. Prior to that, Kesi has held various roles in trading and banking within Bank of America. Kesi graduated from Boston College and is a CFA Charterholder.

Liz McDonald is a VP on the Morgan Stanley Non-Agency RMBS desk.  Prior to joining Morgan Stanley, Liz worked at JP Morgan from 2016-2021.  Across her career she has traded all parts of the non-agency universe with a current focus on CRT, legacy, and subs.  She graduated with honors from Princeton University in 2016 with an A.B in Economics and a concentration in Finance.

Nick Maciunas is a Managing Director and head of Agency MBS Research at J.P. Morgan. His work focuses on market strategy, analyzing prepayment trends, and interpreting policy. In addition, he contributes to the development of the firm’s prepayment models. Nick and his team have been recognized by Institutional Investor’s Fixed Income Survey with rankings in Prepayments, Agency CMOs & Derivatives, and Strategy. He earned an AB in Economics from Princeton University.

Oren Benzaquen is a Managing Director and Head of Non-Agency RMBS at Guggenheim Securities. He joined in February 2024. Oren is responsible for secondary trading across the Non-Agency space as well as non-cusip mortgage opportunities. Before joining Guggenheim, Oren spent over 12 years at Barclays where he last ran the Non-Agency RMBS trading desk and held various trading roles during his time there. Oren has been trading CRT since the inception of the product in 2013. Oren graduated from Columbia University in 2011 with a BA in Econ-Math.

Pratik Gupta is a Managing Director and head of CLO and RMBS Strategy. Gupta and his team are responsible for covering trends in mortgage credit, Housing and its securitized market in the US and publishing their views on relative-value across sub-sectors and focal risk points for investors, as well as highlighting issues around governing documents and ongoing court cases. Gupta is responsible for covering the CLO market, focusing on underlying CLO manager behavior, trends in the underlying leveraged loan asset class, relative value and performance trends. Regular research publications include Non-Agency Alert, Non-Agency MBS Weekly, CLO Alert, and CLO Weekly.

Gupta has been ranked #1 in the Institutional Investor Survey for the past 5 years in Non-Agency RMBS since 2020. He has been ranked #1 in CLOs for the past 4 years since 2021. His team was ranked as the ‘Best US CLO Research’ in the 2021, 2022 and 2023 Creditflux survey. He has been awarded with the ‘Best Research’ award by the LSTA and Deal Catalyst in 2023, 2024 & 2025.

He was the co-head of RMBS/CLO research at Nomura until 2019. He has an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad, and a Bachelor’s and Master’s in Electronics from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras.

For more information about any awards cited, visit https://go.bofa.com/awards

Sainadh joined One William Street Capital Management in 2014 and currently serves as a Senior Portfolio Manager for the Residential Credit Strategy. In this role, he is responsible for sourcing, structuring, monitoring, and executing investments in securities and whole loans across residential mortgage credit. Sainadh holds a Master of Science degree in Operations Research and Financial Engineering from Columbia University.

Walt is a 30-year fixed income veteran and is based in the Chicago office. Walt focuses on Total Rate of Return Structured Product portfolio strategies for money managers, insurance companies, central banks, sovereign wealth funds, corporations, hedge funds, municipalities, and large depositories on a global scale. Walt is responsible for the management of the Mortgage Strategies area and the coordination of the Structured Product business within the firm. He is a frequent public speaker and discussion facilitator in both industry association and customer-sponsored settings. He has also been widely quoted in the print media and has appeared in the television media to discuss market trends.

Walt holds an M.B.A. from the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago with concentrations in Finance and Accounting, an M.A. from the University of Chicago in Social Science/International Relations, and a B.A. (with Honor) from Michigan State University in Social Science/International Relations. He is a member of both the CFA Institute and the CFA Society of Chicago.

Zachary Aronson is a Director at MacKay Shields LLC, serving as a Portfolio Manager and Structured Products Credit Analyst on the Global Credit and Global Fixed Income teams. He focuses on investments across Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities (RMBS), Commercial Mortgage-Backed Securities (CMBS), and Asset-Backed Securities (ABS). He is a portfolio manager for the NYLI MacKay Securitized Income ETF (SECR), an actively managed fund offering exposure to structured credit markets. Prior to joining MacKay Shields in 2019, he worked at Ally Bank where he was responsible for analyzing and trading Asset Backed Securities, Commercial Mortgage-Backed Securities and non-Agency Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities.   Zach earned a Bachelor of Science in Finance in 2009 from the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, College Park. He has been in the investment management industry since 2009.