Our Team
Manuel E. Mejía-Aoun
Chief Investment Officer/Member of the Board of Directors
Mr. Mejía-Aoun joined Bladex in October 2005. Prior to Bladex, he had his own consulting firm, MMA Associates. Mr. Mejía-Aoun created and was CEO of Maxblue by Deutsche Bank, Deutsche Bank’s first personal financial consultancy business, targeted at the affluent investors in Latin America from January 2000 to December 2002. He sold 49.9% of Maxblue, on behalf of Deutsche Bank, at a valuation of $180.0 million in 2002. From 1996 to creating Maxblue in 2000, he headed the Latin American Foreign Exchange and Local Money Markets Sales and Trading Group at Deutsche Bank. In 1995, Mr. Mejía-Aoun was the Chief Emerging Markets Strategist at Merrill Lynch covering fixed income securities in Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia. From 1987 to 1995, he created and ran the Emerging Markets Trading Group at Merrill Lynch. He is a Founding Member and former Vice-Chairman of the Emerging Markets Traders Association. Mr. Mejía-Aoun received an MBA in Finance from Thunderbird (American Graduate School of International Management) and a BS in Business Administration from Southeast Missouri State University (summa cum laude) with a double major in Marketing and Finance.
Tulio P. Vera
Chief Strategist and Head of Client Relations
Mr.Vera joined Bladex in July 2008. Prior to Bladex, he spent nine years as an MD and Chief EM Macro and Debt Strategist for Merrill Lynch. In this capacity, he was responsible for: (i) global EM debt research and investment strategy; (ii) macroeconomic research for Latin America and Emerging Europe; and (iii) cross-asset class investment strategy across debt/equity/fx for Latin America. He was a member of the Merrill’s Operating Committee for Latin America and the firm’s Global Debt Risk Council. From 1997 to 1999, Mr.Vera ran global EM fixed income research for ABN-AMRO. From 1994 to 1997, he was in charge of sovereign-debt research and market strategy for Latin America at Bear Stearns. Previously, he was a Financial Officer at the International Finance Corporation – the private-sector arm of the World Bank – and was a senior sovereign analyst at Moody’s. He received a BA in Architecture from the University of Maryland and has a Master’s degree (and is ABD) in International Finance and Monetary Economics from New York University. He has earned numerous awards including individual and team rankings in the various industry analyst surveys. He maintains an extensive network of contacts among senior officials, specialists, and market participants. He regularly speaks at conferences and appears in printed and visual media.
Urvish Bidkar, PhD
Portfolio Manager
Dr. Urvish Bidkar joined Bladex Asset Management in June 2006. Prior to joining Bladex, Dr. Bidkar was a Desk Strategist at Bear Stearns as part of the Emerging Markets group. His main responsibilities were creating and implementing proprietary, intra-country, relative value models covering all major emerging market credits and managing a relative value book of bonds and CDS. In addition, he provided clients with trading perspectives and market commentaries, discussing topical ideas, events, and monitoring other markets. In 2003, he joined to the Quantitative Credit Analytics and Modeling team at Citigroup where his responsibilities included developing an intra-country relative value model for the Emerging Markets cash trading desk, initiating quantitative strategies for Asian credits and introduced several new derivative products such as the Emerging Markets iBoxx indices and tranched products. In 1996, Dr. Bidkar joined the quantitative analytics/modeling group of YieldBook at Salomon Brothers. There, he developed and implemented algorithms for pricing fixed income securities. He also developed a live, Monte-Carlo-based methodology for fixed income portfolios. Dr. Bidkar has a Bachelor of Technology in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology at Mumbai in India (1990) and a PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin (1996).
John Cadley
Compliance and Risk Management Officer
Mr. John Cadley has extensive experience in the emerging markets asset class and in the trading and management of large portfolios with complex fixed-income instruments. Prior to joining Bladex Asset Management, Mr. Cadley was at IFL Victoria Fund, an emerging market fixed income fund. Before joining IFL, Mr. Cadley spent three years as a Director in Latin American Debt Capital Markets at Merrill Lynch, where he focused on liability management for sovereign entities. He advised governments regarding debt issuance, and was one of the key members of the Merrill team which underwrote and distributed large sovereign debt issues. Previously, he spent half a decade in the emerging markets group at J.P. Morgan in research, on the prop desk and heading the firm’s emerging markets Liability Management Group. During that time, he received Institutional Investor magazine’s 1st Team award for Emerging Markets Quantitative Research. Mr. Cadley also has several years of experience structuring and trading very complex mortgage-related products. At First Boston, he was a market maker in IOs and POs, which are volatile mortgage derivative securities. He structured complex CMOs at Lehman Brothers, and spent three years running the large off-balance sheet mortgage derivative book at Merrill Lynch. Before beginning his private-sector career in 1983 at AT&T Bell Laboratories, he served as a Captain in the U.S. Army.