Jay Loftus recently celebrated his 25th anniversary at Merrill Lynch. It’s been a varied and interesting time, one which he could not have imagined or planned. Mr. Loftus started in the “back office” for the government bond department. He graduated to working on the repo trading desk after a year. From there, he became a trader, first on the financial futures and options desk, then onto the non-dollar trading desk for seven years After trading various European, Asian and Canadian government and sovereign bonds, along with the various currencies, Mr. Loftus went to Tokyo. In Tokyo, he ran the non-yen high grade trading desk for over five years. He came back to the U.S., and for a short time, worked on the collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) desk before moving into sales. In sales, Loftus worked on the merging markets and hi-yield sales team. His customers were the smaller broker dealers around the US and Latin America. Following this, Mr. Loftus created a dealer sales desk within municipal markets. His last stop, two years ago, has been in global infrastructure solutions.