Mr. Backshall is a leading authority and advisor on credit trading and investment strategy, with fifteen years of experience on both the buy-side and sell-side of the market. He is widely quoted in the financial press and regularly appears in the media as an authority on credit derivatives and the capital markets. An innovator of credit models and trading techniques, Mr. Backshall oversees a research program that combines quantitative and fundamental analysis to help clients trade across markets and manage risk. He formerly served as Director of Credit Market Strategy at MSCI-Barra. Mr. Backshall was Vice President and Product Manager for Deutsche Bank/Bankers Trust in New York, London and Tokyo. He has been with CDR since 2005. Mr. Backshall earned a B.Sc. degree in Accounting and Finance from Warwick University.

Mr. Klein leads the team that develops and publishes CDR’s indices, and also manages CDR's capital structure and equities products. Under his direction, CDR has taken the lead in developing innovative index methods for credit markets. He spearheaded the invention of the Maximum Running Spread (patent pending), a technique for efficiently dealing with default events. Mr. Klein has fourteen years of experience in managing technology design and implementation. He joined CDR in 2006. Mr. Klein earned a BA and an MA in Mathematics from Washington University in St. Louis and an MFE from the University of California at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

Byron Douglass manages the team responsible for the directional credit, bonds and structured credit product offerings (market commentary, trade ideas, and relative value analysis). Byron has over 10 years of derivatives trading and research experience on both the sell-side and buy-side. He joined CDR in 2007. Most recently he was a quantitative credit analyst at Barclays Global Investors in San Francisco where he developed alpha-generating models for BGI’s credit long/short hedge fund. In addition, he was part of the structured product team which managed several billion dollars of synthetic CDOs. Prior to BGI, he was an equity derivatives trader at Goldman Sachs in London where he traded several different European based volatility products. Byron earned a BA in Mathematics from Vanderbilt University and a MFE from the University of California at Berkeley's Haas School of Business.