Nine Make Exodus to C.L. King From First Albany

Nine traders left the First Albany Cos. for Albany, N.Y.-based C.L. King & Associates Inc. on Friday morning, saying they would rather not stay with the firm through its many ongoing transitions. Three of the traders focus on municipal bonds. Following the traders’ departure, First Albany announced it would close the fixed-income middle market group, which was staffed by the traders, and sell the group’s portfolio to C.L. King. This is just the latest move indicative of a rapidly changing company that was once a mainstay of public finance in and around New York.First Albany is in the process of selling its name and its municipal capital markets group — which includes muni traders, bankers, and derivatives professionals, among others — to DEPFA Bank PLC, a public finance bank based in both Germany and Ireland. The nine traders who joined C.L. King last week were not part of this group.In May, the First Albany parent company also announced that it was getting a $50 million equity investment from an affiliate of MatlinPatterson Global Opportunities Partners II and that Lee Fensterstock would be named its new chairman and chief executive officer. First Albany had about $27 million of shares floating on the Nasdaq exchange yesterday afternoon.For the nine traders who left, the company was simply evolving in directions they did not want to go, said Chris Edwards, the group’s leader and now a managing director at C.L. King. He added that they had been considering the option of leaving First Albany for some time and needed to make a decision at some point.“We came to a fork in the road and we took it,” Edwards said, paraphrasing baseball great Yogi Berra.Three of the nine traders — Dave Suozzo, Judd Newkirk, and Joe Macfarlane — concentrate on munis. The rest of the team focuses on other fixed-income assets classes, such as agencies, mortgage-backed and asset-backed securities, corporates, preferreds, and convertibles, Edwards said.C.L. King did not have any muni-specific traders until Friday.