Carl Blake

Founded in 1994, GimmeCredit LLC is a research firm located in New York City. The firm provides research and analysis on investment grade and crossover bonds aimed at maximizing relative value, preserving capital and anticipating changes in credit quality. Their high yield reports provide investors and traders with relative value recommendations based on in-depth research on credit quality, capital structure, valuation and market prices. GimmeCredit's intraday comments provide immediate analysis of the implications of events and market activity during the trading day. The firm assigns credit scores to each of the companies in their universe to indicate their judgment as to the direction of a company's credit quality over the upcoming six months.

Founded in 1989, FBR Capital Markets & Co., formerly Friedman, Billings, Ramsey & Co., is a broker/dealer headquartered in Arlington, Virginia with additional offices throughout the US. The firm is a subsidiary of FBR Capital Markets Holdings, Inc.. and their ultimate parent is FBR & Co. (NASDAQ: FBRC). In 2007, FBR Capital Markets Corp. was spun out from FBR Group as an independent investment bank, of which FBR Group retained majority ownership. FBR Capital Markets is registered with the SEC and is a member of FINRA, Nasdaq and the SIPC. FBR Capital Markets' Equity Sales & Trading Group provides institutional sales and trading services to over 1300 institutional accounts in the US, Canada, Europe, Australia and Asia. Their clients include mutual funds, hedge funds, money managers, endowments, foundations, banks, insurance companies and pension and profit sharing plans. They actively trade on behalf of clients and make markets in almost 1000 stocks traded on the NYSE, listed and OTC markets and trade more than $100 billion of securities on a per annum basis. In 2009, FBR Capital Markets began making markets in selected stocks traded on the London Stock Exchange and Euronext. In addition to agency trading in listed securities markets, they act as market-maker in Nasdaq and other OTC securities. They are one of the largest distributors of the shares of small- and mid-cap companies in public and private securities offerings and have deep trading expertise in the vertical industry groups in which the firm's investment banking and research teams specialize. These sectors include: (1) consumer (2) diversified industrials (3) energy and natural resources (4) financial institutions (5) healthcare (6) insurance (7) real estate (8) Washington policy analysis and (0) technology, media and telecommunications. The firm's analytical coverage includes a large number of small- and mid-cap companies in addition to large companies. Research is provided by FBR Capital Markets' research department, which is independent from the firm's investment banking department and has the sole authority to determine which companies receive research coverage and the recommendation contained in the coverage.