William Blair & Co. may add up to 20 sales professionals to market mortgage-backed securities, asset-backed securities and corporate bonds from its Chicago office. The new salesmen would report to Moss Cartwright, partner and manager of taxable fixed-income trading, and would join an existing group of 15 salesmen and five traders. Cartwright declined to specify why he is looking to add to the team now.
"We're not a training ground per se and we don't have a sales manager who's going to train anyone. [The wrong person] would be somebody out of a major firm who has had the luxury of having a trader being long on billions of dollars and doing $50 million trades," Cartwright said. He emphasized candidates should be used to working in a regional dealer environment.