Mark V. McCray has joined Newport Beach-based Pimco Advisors Holdings LP as senior VP to manage its municipal bonds department.
He’ll be overseeing $75 million in assets. Pimco is one of the world’s largest fixed-income managers with assets totaling more than $250 billion, mostly in mortgage, government and corporate bonds.
“It’s relatively small right now,” said McCray, 33, of Pimco’s municipal bond operation. “We have lofty ambitions. We would like to see them grow tremendously.”
Before coming to Pimco, McCray was a VP at Goldman Sachs & Co., where he was co-head of municipal bond trading, responsible for risk and profit-and-loss measurement and reporting for the institutional retail and proprietary business, while supervising the daily activity and risk positions of seven traders. He is a former financial analyst for the Merrill Lynch Capital Markets Mergers and Acquisitions Group.
A graduate of Temple University with a degree in business administration, McCray went on to earn an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
In his new job, he is overseeing four funds: the PIMCO Municipal Bond Fund and three new funds introduced last year: the California Intermediate Municipal Bond Fund, the New York Intermediate Bond Fund and the Short-Duration Municipal Income Fund.
While New York City was good for financial contacts when McCray was a broker dealer, he said it’s not as important now that he’s a municipal bond buyer. He added that many buyers are not located in New York.
“It was nice to establish personal relations for dinners and social activities, but now with technology and the telephone, I can maintain the relationships. I talk to the broker dealers over the phone five to 10 times a day,” he said.
McCray said Pimco’s status in the financial world made it easier to make the jump to Newport Beach.
“They have a reputation in the marketplace for being smart money,” he said.
He is married and his hobbies include backgammon, skiing and taking care of his two dachshunds.
