Article

Investment Dealer's Digest Magazine
November 27, 2006
page 20
"40 Under 40" Article Excerpt

Chris Ricciradi
Cohen & Co. CEO

The moves made by Chris Ricciardi are meticulously watched in the world of structured finance because Ricciardi's name has become synonymous with one of the Street's fastest growing markets, collateral debt obligations, or CDOs, as they are more commonly known.

CDOs can be thought of as the mutual funds of the structured finance world - they are a debt market product with a lot of moving parts packaged inside. It was his understanding of where to source new moving parts - the collateral - that made Ricciardi a rising star in the industry and garnered him the top executive position at Cohen & Co. earlier this year.

Cohen plucked Ricciardi from Merrill Lynch in February where he was a director and head of global structured credit products. Word of the move, first broken by IDD, spread like wildfire due equally to Ricciardi's high ranking and the trends he's been ahead of.

He may be a tad too young to be dubbed a "grandfather" of the CDO market, but in 1999, as head of CDO banking at Prudential Securities, Ricciardi was part of a team that made history by creating the first CDO packed with asset backed securities. Ricciardi and his team moved to CSFB in 2000 and in the three years they were there, the bank shot to the top of the CDO league tables, primarily based upon the issuance of ABS CDOs.

Ricciardi received an MBA in 1997 from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.

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About Cohen & Company

Cohen & Company is a leading structured credit investment management firm with over $30 billion in assets under management in collateralized debt obligations and other funds across multiple asset classes. With offices in Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles and Paris, Cohen & Company employs over 130 employees worldwide, and serves a diverse international network of institutional and individual clients. For more information about Cohen & Company, we encourage you to visit www.cohenandcompany.com.