Knight Capital Group has established Knight Advisor Services to provide fixed income sales, trading and research to the investment advisor community. A team of five experienced traders and relationship managers have joined Knight from Morgan Stanley to form the new platform.

Joshua Zucker, md, leads credit sales and trading for the group, while Bohn Vergari becomes a director in Registered Investment Advisor (RIA) sales. Joseph Miller, vp, is responsible for credit sales and Patrick Moore - also a vp - broker-dealer sales. John Browning, an avp, will lead business development.

"Investment advisors have been left to develop their own networks of trading partners and research providers. Knight Advisor Services addresses the coverage gap by serving sophisticated investment advisors, who seek competitive pricing, deep inventory and service, but who are less active or execute in smaller trade sizes than the average portfolio manager," says Gary Katcher, evp, head of global institutional fixed income at Knight Capital Group.

He adds: "We see an opportunity to better serve this client base by combining the expertise of our new team with Knight's electronic and voice access and trading, deep resources and broad universe of products."

Zucker built Morgan Stanley's special situations group, focusing on providing the top fixed income-producing financial advisors with trade ideas and execution. He has more than 12 years experience in credit trading and sales overall.

Vergari joins Knight after 12 years in dealer and RIA fixed income sales at Morgan Stanley. He managed the bank's internal service desk for fixed income-producing financial advisors and was also responsible for launching its municipal dealer sales group to provide the broker-dealer community with access to the firm's municipal inventory.

Miller spent seven years at Morgan Stanley, where he assisted in providing fixed income sales coverage to the top advisors within the firm's retail brokerage force.

Moore has more than 12 years of experience in fixed income sales. Working for Morgan Stanley in New York, San Francisco and the UK, he assisted the firm's broker-dealers and private bank clients with fixed income solutions.

Browning joins Knight from Morgan Stanley, where he led business development efforts for the RIA fixed income sales desk. Previously, he worked as an investment grade credit analyst with J&W Seligman until 2008.

Knight Advisor Services clients include RIAs and broker-dealers, who serve high net-worth investors, endowments and foundations. The team trades investment grade corporates, municipals and certificates of deposit, among other fixed income securities in demand by investment advisors.