The 20 Rising Stars of Fixed Income 2008

said.“The first one is easy; the second two are much more challenging.” A challenge is not something Masding has shied away from in the past. He recently completed a 2,000-kilometer cycling trip through southern Europe – an idea that sounded great in theory but proved to be quite difficult in reality. “I went mostly for the travel, but we underestimated the cycling part,” he said.“After falling way short of our plans on the first couple days, the reality dawned upon us and it became far more about completing the objective we had set for ourselves.” Professionally, Masding plans to rise to the challenges before him and work with Watson Wyatt’s large pension fund clients to help them navigate the everchanging investment world. focus from growth to income, Nicholson noted.“I also think we will see a proliferation of new products that will look to address this need, including very specific exchange-traded funds, exchange-traded notes, structured products, etcetera,” he added. Nicholson, a member of the Global FIX Protocol Fixed Income Committee, is quoted regularly in Wall Street Letter and Securities Industry News and has appeared as a panelist at various industry events. Before joining ValuBond, he worked for four years as an earnings analyst and later an account executive at First Call/ Thomson Financial. 13. 13 . MARSHALL NICHOLSON age firms by providing access to centralized liquidity and automated execution services. Its electronic trading platform is used daily by more than 200 brokerage firms to trade retail-size lots of municipal, corporate, agency and Treasury bonds, as well as certificates of deposit. The firm plans to add unit investment trusts, auction rate securities and commercial mortgage obligations to the system in the future. According to Nicholson, these are exciting times for fixed-income ECNs, as the market is on the verge of widespread adoption of electronic trading. “Electronic trading will certainly continue to gain market acceptance over the next decade,” he said. “As it does, we’ll see new fixed-income trading models appear. I can foresee hedge funds employing algorithms to trade fixed income and act as market makers alongside the dealer community.” This growth will be supported by an increase in general demand for fixedincome instruments, as large numbers of Baby Boomers shift their investment 14. ROB PORTER Director of Interest Rate Derivative Trading, Global Markets Standard Bank of South Africa, Johannesburg Age: 39 Education: University of Natal (B.Comm. in Finance) Mentors: Willie Potgieter, Director and Global Head of Global Markets, Standard Bank; Marc van der Spuy, Director and Global Head of Global Markets, Standard Bank As director of interest rate derivative trading at Standard Bank, Porter is responsible for overseeing the trading of a wide array of interest rate derivative products, including forward rate agreements, overnight deposit swaps, interest rate options and a variety of interest rate swaps. For nearly five years, he has worked with the bank’s team of traders and structurers to grow its revenue and product range and expand its interest rate trading platform throughout Africa. This, he said, is his biggest career accomplishment so far. Porter considers trading an egalitarian career.“I was attracted by the concept of a zero-sum game and the fact that perMAY 2008 MARSHALL NICHOLSON Head of Knight BondPoint Knight Capital Group, Atlanta Age: 35 Education: University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (B.A. in History and Journalism); University of Georgia (M.B.A.) Mentors: John Pigott, Founder and Former Chief Executive Officer, ValuBond, Inc.; James Smyth, Executive Vice President and Head of the Broker-Dealer Group, Knight Capital Group Nicholson joined ValuBond in 2001, just after the start-up had secured its second round of venture capital financing. By mid-2006, when the firm was acquired by Knight Capital Group for just over $18 million, he was head of sales with responsibility for attracting dealers to the fixed-income electronic crossing network (ECN). He now heads up the business, which was re-branded in January as Knight BondPoint. Knight BondPoint caters to retail broker20 FIXED INCOME RISING STARS

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