TEAM
ANDREW “ANDY” BALL
Partner & CIO
Mr. Ball co-founded RichBrook in 2020. He was previously a portfolio manager at West Side Advisors from July 2009 to Feb 2020. In this role he co-managed roughly $600mm over that period with peak AUM reaching roughly $975mm. In addition, he co-managed West Side’s student loan investments and served as a member of the Board of Directors for Alcar LLC, a bank holding company. Prior to joining West Side, he was a mortgage derivative trader for the UBS CMO desk. Mr. Ball traded Trust and Structured IO/PO as well as Agency and Non-Agency mortgage derivative products. In 2009, he co-ran the mortgage derivative portfolio and oversaw the exit/liquidation of UBS’s mortgage derivative business. Mr. Ball was responsible for co-managing over $1 billion of Agency mortgage derivatives during this period. He built his career with a strong foundation in quantitative analysis first as a financial engineer for the mortgage portfolio at Freddie Mac and later building and implementing prepayment models at Wells Fargo Mortgage. He moved to UBS as the head prepayment strategist, writing prepayment commentary for the Mortgage Strategist and overseeing UBS’s prepayment modeling operations. Mr. Ball received a B.A. in Economics from The College of William and Mary. Mr Ball serves on the Boards of several non-profits and associations.
VLAD KOTLYARSKY
Partner & Portfolio Manager
Mr. Kotlyarsky co-founded RichBrook in 2020. He previously worked as a portfolio manager for West Side Advisors from July 2009 to Feb 2020. In this role he co-managed roughly $600mm over that period with peak AUM reaching roughly $975mm. Prior to West Side, he co-managed the mortgage derivative portfolio for the UBS Proprietary trading desk. Mr. Kotlyarsky was responsible for overseeing $400 million in capital. He then migrated to the UBS CMO desk to trade Agency mortgage derivatives. He co-managed the successful liquidation of $1 billion in Agency mortgage securities when UBS decided to exit the business. Mr. Kotlyarsky developed his mortgage business acumen at J.P. Morgan Securities where he began his career as a desk analyst and gained expertise in deal modeling and CMO structuring. He subsequently assumed a seat as a market maker where he traded Agency Mortgage-Backed Securities and structured products. Mr. Kotlyarsky received a B.S. in Finance and Marketing from Lehigh University.
EDWARD "ED" RUSSELL
Partner/Chief Business Officer/CCO
Mr. Russell joined RichBrook in 2022. Before joining RichBrook he founded Ballyellis Holdings, which provided investment consulting services to clients such as family offices and alternative investment managers. During this period, he also created and launched Bawnmore, a brand of protein snack foods (beef jerky, biltong) that uses Irish beef as its main ingredient. Prior to Ballyellis & Bawnmore, he worked as an investment manager for over twelve years. Most recently he was one of the founders of Fidelis Insurance (a Bermuda re/insurer) and served as its Chief Investment Officer. Ed also spent several years at Gottex Fund Management where he was a member of the firm’s investment and allocation committees, a portfolio manager for the firm’s flagship funds and the head of research for fixed income and credit strategies. While at Gottex he held primary responsibility for the firm’s investments with West Side Advisors (as managed by Messrs. Ball and Kotlyarsky). At the beginning of his career Ed worked at Provident Group, Lehman Brothers and FMC Corporation. He holds a M.B.A. in Finance from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, as well as a B.E. in Chemical Engineering from University College Dublin.
SARAH STEPHENS
COO
Ms. Stephens joined RichBrook in 2020 as the head of middle and back-office operations. Previously, she worked at West Side Advisors from July 2011 to April 2020 managing middle and back-office operations. She was responsible for tasks within fund valuation, accounting, audit and compliance. Prior to West Side, she worked at Metropolitan Life Insurance Company with one of the financial advisory teams in an administrative and marketing role. Ms. Stephens received a B.A. in Human Development & Family Studies from the University of Connecticut.
MICHAEL "MIKE" STEFANELLI, CFA
Portfolio Manager
Mr. Stefanelli joined RichBrook in 2022. He was previously a senior trader at Semper Capital Management. In this role he served as the primary trader and analyst responsible for covering non-Agency MBS sectors such as Non-QM, Jumbo 2.0, CRT, and SFR, as part of an investment team managing over $2 billion of non-Agency MBS across both long-only and absolute return vehicles. Prior to joining Semper, he was a consultant in the structured products practice of PricewaterhouseCoopers, specializing in modelling, structuring and valuation of non-Agency mortgage products.
Mr. Stefanelli earned a M.S. in Accountancy from Wake Forest University and a B.S. in Accounting and Business from Washington and Lee University. He earned the right to use the CFA designation in 2018 and has been a member of CFA Society New York since that time.
BOYUAN "CHRISTINA" XU
Senior Analyst
Ms. Xu joined RichBrook in 2022. She previously worked at Citigroup Global Markets, where she was an Assistant Vice President on the Structured Credit repo trading desk. In this role she co-managed the securitized products financing book in New York, handled flow trades, assisted with structuring episodic transactions, and helped formulate solutions based on client needs. Before that she worked on their U.S. Rates Strategy desk as a research analyst, where she developed and improved infrastructure to efficiently monitor front-end rates and rate hike expectations, designed relative value scanners, and assisted with idea generation and regression analysis for topical content on research publications.
Ms. Xu received a B.S. in Commerce from the McIntire School of Commerce at the University of Virginia and is pursuing a Master of Computer and Information Technology degree from the University of Pennsylvania.
ALEX DUAN
Senior Analyst
Mr. Duan joined RichBrook in 2022. He previously worked as a quantitative research associate for the Wells Fargo Investment Portfolio group. In this role he designed hedging strategies to manage the interest rate risk of the firm’s $9 billion mortgage servicing rights (MSR) portfolio. He was also responsible for building a risk and profit & loss aggregation system for the MSR business as well as developing pricing and risk management models for mortgage and interest rate derivatives.
Mr. Duan received a M.S. in Computational Finance from Carnegie Mellon University, and a B.S. in Statistics from Nanjing University.