Mickey Wohl, a long-time municipal professional, financial consultant and pioneer in the fixed-income capital markets who was credited with innovations in municipal and taxable securities structures and platforms, died on Jan. 3 after a long battle with cancer. He was 59.
Wohl, who had more than 30 years of experience in the fixed income industry, was most recently the owner of Wohl LLC, in New York City, where he provided private consulting services for the past eight years.
Wohl's extensive expertise made him an asset to any firm or project he worked on, said his longtime colleague William K. Ludolph, a senior trader at Charles Schwab & Co. in Jersey City, N.J., who began working with Wohl at Citicorp in the early 1980s.
"He had a keen ability to parse through a problem to find a solution," Ludolph said. "His solutions were wide ranging - sometimes structural, sometimes legal and sometimes accounting."
At Wohl LLC, he created and implemented investment platforms for clients, with a focus on services for Municipal Tender Option Bond Programs, such as real-time market analysis and securitization vehicles.
Other consulting work included the development of custom, market-driven evaluation models used in the purchase of municipal bonds and the creation of a historical tracking system of all TOB positions and related cash flows and daily profits and losses.
He also provided financial engineering advisory services related to auction-rate securities, municipal derivatives, and other structured investment products.
From 2004 to 2007, Wohl was a partner and co-founder of MTC Financial Holdings LLC in New York City, where he implemented a third party investment platform for the municipal trust certificate business, and led the implementation of its evaluation, hedging models, and capital raising.
Prior to that, Wohl was the managing director of the municipal securitizations group at Zurich Capital Markets Inc. in New York from 2000-2004. As co-head of the group he created, developed and marketed a Zurich Trust Certificate Program, which generated annual revenues of $15 million, tax-exempt. He was responsible for secondary market securitizations, tax curve arbitrage, and marketing of various structured products.
He was also previously a director in the financial engineering group at Banc One Capital Markets in New York from 1998 to 2000. As a co-head of the group he was responsible for secondary market securitizations for both the taxable and tax-advantaged and municipal obligations, including a municipal trust certificate program that produced annual revenues of $12 million.
His professional career also included a role as managing director of the structured products group at Bankers Trust Co. from 1990 to 1998, where he implemented and developed auction-rate security and inverse floating security issuance programs for municipal issuers, as well as vice president of municipal rate risk management at Citigroup Securities Inc., from 1978-1990, where he created synthetic tender option bond structures and issued and managed over $4 billion of tender option bonds.
"It was working with him as his partner at BancOne, Zurich Capital Markets and MTC Holdings that I got to understand his brilliance, and high ethical standard," Ludolph said.
In addition to his roles at Wall Street firms, Wohl put his years of financial knowledge and experience to work as a finance professor at Bernard M. Baruch College, as well as an adjunct statistics professor at Adelphi University. He received a Bachelor of Business Administration degree in statistics and operation research from Baruch College in 1978.
