Cuttone & Company, a New York City-based institutional broker, has appointed Richard Christ Managing Director.

In the newly created position, Christ will oversee the facilitation of trade information between the exchange floor, the firm's regional offices in Dallas and West Palm Beach and its upstairs trading desk.

Christ has spent more than 20 years on the buy and the sell-side, most recently as head trader at Loeb Partners, a multi-strategy hedge fund.

"My role is to optimize the firm's offerings and to customize those offerings as well," says Christ. "Our goal as we continue to develop our offerings is to provide a very robust execution platform and to optimize our trading and sales efforts by aggregating order flow and trading ideas and disseminating that out to clients so they can be most effective in executing their trading strategies with our help."

Christ adds that the firm is looking to provide clients with trading strategy help through ideas such as how they approach execution, which venues are best for certain trades, basically, "a better way of accomplishing their trading goals."

"We're not looking to interject ourselves, but what we are looking to do is assemble a group of people with a great deal of experience with trading strategies," Christ explains. "Our strong presence on the New York Stock Exchange trading floor also gives us an edge now."

Adds Donato Cuttone, Senior Managing Director and Vice Chairman at Cuttone & Company, "With the consolidation of the big broker dealers and banks and the growth in electronic trading there's an enormous business opportunity and it's the right time to put the proper people in place to take advantage."