TheMuniCenter Hires McGowan Amid N.Y. Move

Adding to its strength in large-block municipal bond trades, online platform TheMuniCenter LLC announced yesterday that it has hired Patrick McGowan to join its institutional block trading desk in New York City. McGowan’s hire comes as the company is preparing to move its staff to a new, larger New York office, and as secondary-market participants turn increasingly to electronic platforms in their day-to-day business.TheMuniCenter hired McGowan as someone the company will rely on to develop relationships with institutional clients and work with TheMuniCenter’s technological advances and add-ons, said chief operating officer James Wangsness. McGowan comes to his new job from Municipal Partners Inc. and has more than 20 years of industry experience, according to TheMuniCenter.About two-thirds to three-quarters of the company’s staff now focus on muni bonds, while about one-quarter work on taxable products, Wangsness said. Among online trading platforms in the muni market, TheMuniCenter is known for its use among institutional buyers.One New York trader said he tends to sells more large blocks of bonds on TheMuniCenter than on the BondDesk Group LLC or ValuBond Inc. systems. The trader said that his firm uploads its inventory to all three systems simultaneously.“I have occasionally sold million-bond lots or half-million-bond lots on MuniCenter,” the trader said.For this trader’s firm, BondDesk tends to provide a high volume of trades, though many of them are for smaller blocks — a range of $25,000 to $100,000 — he said, adding that he sees these orders going more often to retail buyers.Wangsness said that, while 10% of the company’s business a year ago came from block trading, these trades now average about 25% of total business.TheMuniCenter executed about $5 billion of muni trades during the third quarter — about 15% of all inter-dealer transactions reported to the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board, according to the company. There were about 14,500 municipal line items worth a combined $9.9 billion listed on TheMuniCenter yesterday afternoon.Even in August, now notorious as a period of stagnant secondary markets and diverging market indexes, TheMuniCenter’s business was seeing benefits, according to Wangsness. He said his company’s hybrid phone-electronic trading system, along with its online market tools and policy of anonymous trades, brought in buyers focused on being efficient in an inventory-starved market.“You could come to a platform like ours and not tip your hand about what you were doing position-wise,” he said.This growth is one of the main reasons that TheMuniCenter is moving into a new Manhattan office next month.In addition to being more “client-friendly” than its current space, the new office will have room for a 30-desk trading operation — an upgrade from the 20-desk space TheMuniCenter now uses, according to Wangsness.