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Rosenblatt Securities announced that it has hired Joseph M. Benanti, a long-time veteran of Paine Webber and Robertson Stephens who for the last several years has been running his own floor brokerage firm. This follows Rosenblatt’s hiring of a four-man team from Joseph A. Sangimino, Inc. in March, earlier this year.
Dick Rosenblatt, CEO of Rosenblatt Securities and one of six Executive Floor Governors of the NYSE, said, “Joe has been a member of the Exchange since 1982 and has served as a Governor and executive member of the Alliance of Floor Brokers among other roles. He is not only a great floor broker, but someone who is well-respected on the floor and in the broader trading community, involved for many years in the NYSE’s FACTS program that educates buy-side professionals and invited in 2005 to join the National Organization of Investment Professionals (NOIP). We are very pleased to be adding someone of his caliber to further strengthen our team.”
Joe Benanti commented that “Having made the transition from a floor-brokerage only firm to a full service equities execution firm with an upstairs desk that trades both single stocks and programs in listed and Nasdaq markets, Rosenblatt is in a unique position to assist me with my own transition in a world that is no longer floor-centric. The tools they have in place, from access to all meaningful pools of liquidity in other exchanges, ECNs and crossing networks/dark pools to state-of-art algorithms and their market-leading market structure advice, will allow our customers to benefit beyond simply delivering high quality floor execution. It’s the perfect platform from which to service clients and once again add value in a rapidly changing business environment.”
Joe Gawronski, President and COO of Rosenblatt Securities, added that, “While we’d agree with the many firms decreasing their floor presence that the increase in electronic trading that has accompanied the launch of the NYSE Hybrid and the prevalence of algorithmic trading more generally has decreased the amount of human crowd trading, we’re finding that that makes the need for color from the crowd even more pressing for our customers. Additionally, since the reserve and discretionary features of the Hybrid are only available to brokers, not DMA customers who are only accessing the NYSE electronically, maximizing one’s ability to interact with incoming electronic order flow and getting price and/or volume improvement absolutely requires a strong floor brokerage presence and this gives our customers a trading edge. Accordingly, we’ve nearly doubled our footprint on the floor over the past few months, and contrary to popular wisdom, that’s been a successful strategy thus far. We continue to grow our upstairs presence and technology teams too as our pure agency approach, embracing of automation and our focus on elucidating the complex and rapidly changing equity market structure for our customer base is being rewarded.”
About Rosenblatt Securities
Rosenblatt Securities is a New York-headquartered agency-only execution boutique founded in 1979 that also has an office in Dublin. The firm represents traditional institutions, quants and portfolio trading customers in the listed and Nasdaq markets both through its trading desk and via direct access to the NYSE floor, a service that it pioneered in the late 1980s. In addition, it has been at the forefront of embracing automation to enhance trading efficiency and the self-sufficiency of the buy-side, from creating DOT for non-member firms over fifteen years ago to offering DMA for ECN access and sophisticated algorithmic tools today. The firm believes that its responsibility lies not only in executing orders that are entrusted to it, but also helping clients identify the best tools for when they are trading themselves, use appropriately the tools selected, and navigate an increasingly complex equity marketplace. In addition, the firm provides analysis on the exchange and brokerage space to (i) traders to help them make strategic and tactical adjustments to their trading approaches based on market structure changes and new product developments and (ii) portfolio managers and analysts to add the unique, expert insights of a practitioner to their investment considerations. More information on the firm’s history and its services, as well as market structure and trading strategy pieces it has written, are available at www.rblt.com.
