Guggenheim Capital Markets, LLC, a registered broker/dealer headquartered in New York City with $100 billion in assets, said Monday that it’s the latest firm to jump into the whole loan mix for distressed mortgages — the company will expand upon its existing specialized fixed-income capabilities with the addition of a whole loan group, it said in a press statement. Led by Mary Glass-Schannault and Gretchen Verdugo, both of whom were named managing directors at the firm on Monday, the whole loan group will research, source and price residential loan products, including: first and second lien products, performing, re-performing, sub-performing and non-performing loans, fixed and adjustable rate loans, agency loans and other residential mortgage asset classes. Glass-Schannault said she was looking forward to exploiting what she saw as “excellent potential we see within the whole loan market at this time.” She’s not alone, as HW covered in a story earlier on Monday; whole loans are quickly becoming sought-after trades in the subprime and Alt-A mortgage space. Glass-Schannault is well-known in the mortgage industry for creating the original credit philosophy for the first Alt-A products back in 1993; she was also instrumental in developing the secondary market for the initial Alt-A structured finance transactions. A founder of former Alt-A powerhouse Impac Mortgage Holdings (IMH), she was most recently involved in work at Opteum Financial. For more information, visit http://www.guggenheimpartners.com. Disclosure: The author held no positions in publicly-traded firms mentioned herein when this story was originally published. HW reporters and writers follow a strict disclosure policy, the first in the mortgage trade.