My team and I are responsible for distributing all the agency, FHA, and municipal products that Lument originates. On the agency and FHA side, our market is large Wall Street firms and regional broker/dealers. For municipal transactions, we work with larger mutual funds and money managers.
To keep our deals flowing and maintain our pricing and volume, we must be able to gauge the market. As a result, everyone on our team keeps in close contact with our broker/dealer counterparties. We do everything we can to pass our insights and intelligence to our origination group to help them better understand market dynamics.
We place a premium on building relationships based on trust. Our originators can be confident in the guidance we provide on a complicated credit, and the street can be confident that the product that results will work out fairly for them.
All this works because we have a great team. Our people are very, very good at what they do. As a director, I am as hands-off as I can possibly be while ensuring that we scrupulously adhere to guidance from FINRA and the SEC.
One of the things I’m most proud of is the way we merged the trading desks of our three legacy companies. When ORIX closed the Hunt acquisition in April 2020, each company’s trading desk had its own distinct ways of doing business and traded the whole gamut of products. Because the combined firm was so big, we decided to have a dedicated set of traders for Fannie Mae, Ginnie Mae, and municipal securities. We worked as a group to make sure we picked the best people for each product and established uniform procedures. The result: an outstanding year for the trading desk and Lument as a whole.
You might be surprised to learn that I didn’t initially plan on a career in finance. I was about to graduate college with an engineering degree—I even had an offer in hand—when I decided that I didn’t want to be an engineer. I started exploring business, and a vibrant professor sparked my interest in financial markets. After graduating, I took a job in the field and found that I really liked the challenge of trading securities and responding to market dynamics—making my eventual career at Lument a perfect fit.
