Mortgage Hedge Fund Ellington Plans IPO

An affiliate of Old Greenwich, Conn.-based hedge fund Ellington Fund Management is planning to go public, the mortgage bond investment firm said Tuesday afternoon in a statement. Ellington was founded in December 1994 with an investment from the Ziff family; the company’s founders are primarily vets of Kidder Peabody’s MBS trading and research group. CEO Michael Vranos was Kidder Peabody’s head trader and senior manager in the early 1990’s, when the firm had the industry’s largest CMO book. Only vice chairman Laurence Penn hails from a different trading desk, having run CMO origination and trading at Lehman Brothers in the late 1980s and early 1990s before joining Ellington in 1995. Ellington Financial said on Tuesday it intends to file a registration statement tied to a planned IPO of its common shares, representing limited liability company interests; the firm was founded in August 2007, and is externally managed by an affiliate of Ellington Management Group. A registration statement should be filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission before the end of the third quarter, the company said. Ellington Financial specializes in sub-prime residential mortgage loans, residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS), asset-backed securities, and collateralized debt obligations (CDO). For more information, visit http://www.ellingtonfinancial.com. Write to Paul Jackson at [email protected].