Leadership

RANDALL KATZENSTEIN, Founder & CEO

Randy founded OBEX Securities LLC, a SEC licensed broker dealer, member FINRA/NFA/MSRB/SIPC and OBEX Investments LLC, a Registered Investment Advisor in 2001. From 1986-2001, he was Senior Vice President with Refco Inc. where he managed one of the world’s largest institutional capital markets groups. His earliest employment was with Price Waterhouse & Co and Continental Grain Company in public audit and internal audit, respectively. Throughout his capital markets career, Randy has been working with all facets of commodity trading companies, international banks, sovereign wealth funds and asset managers. His expertise includes quantitative and qualitative asset management. Mr. Katzenstein has overseen the management of billions of dollars in relative value strategies. As one of the principal founders for the International Association for Quantitative Finance (www.iaqf.org), Randy retains his role on their Governing Board and is a participating member of ABANA, www.abana.co.  He has lectured in various forums on quantitative asset management, and price discovery.  He has an Erdős #2.

Randy was one of the two principal founders of a business school in Istanbul, Turkey where he designed the curriculum as well as co-headed management of the school. He has had personal ownership interests in a stock brokerage company in Romania and was a founder of an internet hardware trading firm in Taiwan, along with equity interest in “Yunnan Tin Group”, based in Yunnan Province, China, which processed iron ore tailings.

He received his BSc in Accounting from Syracuse University with extensive studies in Applied Mathematics and Biochemistry.

Randy lives in Tel Aviv, Israel and maintains a home in Westchester County, New York. He has three children and two grandchildren. He holds US, Israeli and German citizenship. He holds Securities Licenses 24, 7, 3, 63.

ALICE M. ROONEY, COO/CCO/CFO

Chief Operating Officer, Chief Compliance Office and Chief Financial Officer for OBEX Group, LLC.  Ms. Rooney has over twenty-five years of experience in the brokerage and investment business including dual overlapping duties and responsibilities related to both a registered broker-dealer and private investment companies.  Most recently, she was Chief Financial Officer and Compliance Officer at Sidoti & Co, LLC.  The firm concentrated on independent small cap research. Ms. Rooney was responsible for managing the firm’s accounting department as well as overseeing compliance for the sales and research divisions. She also served as the Member Representative to the Securities Industry Association.

        Ms. Rooney was COO/CCO/CFO of ipo.com Securities(“IPO”) an institutional broker-dealer from 2001 to 2003. There she was responsible for overseeing all trading activity, legal/compliance, accounting and financial reporting issues of the brokerage operations.  Concurrent with her IPO role, she managed the organization and regulatory application/approval of Sea Port Securities, LLC, an institutional broker-dealer that specialized in distressed and high yield trading.

        From 1986 to 2001, Ms. Rooney was at Amroc Securities LLC and BDS Securities Corp, broker dealers which also specialized in all aspects of distress and high yield trading and research.  She was active in the Loan Syndications and Trading Association.

  Ms. Rooney holds ten securities licenses including three principal licenses.  She has managed eleven regulatory audits/examinations (SEC, FINRA, MSRB). She received her BA in Political Science from State University of New York at Buffalo.

OBEX Team

NAN JIANG, PHD, Senior Quantitative Analyst

Nan has been working at OBEX since 2017.

For several years, Nan taught Economics at Fordham University (Bronx, NY). He holds a B.S. in Finance from Shanghai University and an M.S. in International Economics and Finance from Valparaiso University. In May 2023 he completed his Ph.D. in financial economics under the supervision of D. Frank Hsu.

Most recently, Nan has been active in Econometrics and Microeconomics. He has published several working papers including "Equity Ranking with Stochastic Dominance and Combinatorial Fusion Analysis."

With more than 11 years of complementary work experience, Nan is a proficient data analyst with a strong finance background. He possesses numeracy and programming skills including Python, MATLAB, Stata, SPSS, and MINITAB.

REGGIE HENDERSON, Quantitative Analyst

Reggie began his career in systemized commodity trading in the US and Japan at Mitsui & Co. He then moved into software development for financial derivatives risk management at Citibank, followed by 20 years at The Kamakura Corporation, which has since been acquired by SAS Institute.

Reggie is involved in developing, operating, and evaluating the systemized trading of OVPS. He holds a B.A. in Economics from Columbia University and an M.S. in Computer Science from Rochester Institute of Technology.

REY JIMENEZ, Head of Information Technology

With over forty years of experience and more than twenty years with OBEX, Rey is responsible for the continual process of upgrading systems, applications, and technologies on a global basis, as well as for the integrity and security of all proprietary and non-proprietary data.

He oversees the assessment, design, and implementation of the firm's Disaster Recovery site, including total replication and redundancy of applications, real-time data, market data services, email, and telephony.

Obex Advisors

ALLAN ZAVARRO, Senior Advisor

Mr. Zavarro is an active Senior Advisor to Prime Capital (Bermuda) Limited and an investor in OBEX Group LLC. 

Mr. Zavarro was Chief Executive Officer of the Global Futures business at ABN AMRO for nine years. He was responsible for running the day to day operations of the business. Allan orchestrated the sale of the ABN Global Futures business to Union Bank of Switzerland in 2006 for more than 30 times its purchase price from Citibank. Prior to ABN, Allan was President and CEO of Citicorp Futures.

Prior to Citicorp, Allan was Marketing Manager and Chief Executive of Merrill Lynch’s wholesale securities business; Broadcourt  Capital Corporation and earlier Chief Executive Officer of Merrill Lynch Futures Inc.

Mr. Zavarro majored in English at Southern Illinois University. He resides with his wife in Princeton, NJ and Palm Beach, Florida.

D. FRANK HSU, PHD, Chief Research Advisor

D. Frank Hsu is the Clavius Distinguished Professor of Science, a Professor of Computer and Information Sciences, and the Director of Fordham Laboratory of Informatics and Data Mining at Fordham University.

He received a B.A. from Cheng Kung University, an M.A. from the University of Texas at El Paso, and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.

D. Hsu co-organized several university workshops and forums in partnership with IBM and delivered over 400 speeches at conferences and institutions around the world. He co-founded the International Conference on Cyber Security (ICCS) in 2009. D. Hsu has authored 40 books and published over 200 technical papers. With Dr. Paul Erdos, one of the foremost mathematicians of the 20th century, he co-authored "Distributed Loop Network with Minimum Transmission Delay" (1992). He was elected Fellow by the Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications in 1990, the New York Academy of Sciences in 1999, and the International Institute of Cognitive Informatics and Cognitive Computing in 2012, and is a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

AVITAL PILPEL, PHD, Senior Research Advisor

Dr. Avital Pilpel holds a B.Sc. in mathematics and humanities from the Hebrew University (Jerusalem) and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia University (New York), under the supervision of Prof. Isaac Levi, holder of the John Dewey Chair in Philosophy.

His experience includes more than 17 years teaching philosophy courses at major U.S. and Israeli universities in history, communications, education, and critical thinking. He has published many papers in philosophy, particularly in the field of rational choice. He is also a reserve officer in the IDF's historical research department, writing research papers in military history.

Dr. Pilpel's expertise across philosophical traditions and theories has provided a valued contribution to OVPS' development.

MARK FICHTENBAUM, Legal & Taxation

Mark Fichtenbaum is a Certified Public Accountant and member of the New York State Bar.

He runs a consulting practice advising hedge funds, family offices, and high net worth individuals on the accounting, tax, and regulatory implications of complex financial transactions. His work focuses on helping clients achieve their desired economic outcomes while optimizing their tax and regulatory treatment.

Mark also advises a boutique brokerage firm on SEC and FINRA compliance, assists with regulatory audits, and oversees client securities trading to ensure all filing requirements are met. He regularly publishes articles and presents at conferences on the tax implications of complex financial transactions.

Mark holds an LLM in Taxation from NYU School of Law, a JD from New York Law School, and an MS in Accounting from Brooklyn College. He holds FINRA securities licenses 3, 4, 6, 7, and 24.