Steven Abrahams

Steven Abrahams is a Managing Director and Head of Investment Strategy at Santander US Capital Markets. He brings 35 years of experience in markets and investment strategy. His team provides analysis and advice for institutional investors in rates, financing markets, corporate credit and securitized products. 

Before joining Santander and its predecessor organization, Amherst Pierpont Securities, he served as co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Milepost Capital Management, an SEC-registered investment adviser serving institutions and private funds, and as a director of MTGE Investment Corp., a publicly traded REIT (MTGE:NASDAQ).

From 2010 to 2016, Steve served as Managing Director and Head of MBS and Securitization Research at Deutsche Bank Securities where he sat on the Global Fixed Income Research Executive Committee and the Fixed Income Research Global Strategy Committee. His Deutsche Bank Securities team covered broad issues in structured finance and portfolio construction including the implications of accounting, regulatory and legislative change. The group consulted to the investment portfolios of most major banks, asset managers, insurers, pensions and hedge funds. Steve has advised policymakers at the US Treasury, the Federal Reserve, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the Federal Housing Administration, the Federal Home Loan Bank System, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau and elsewhere.

Steve has served as Managing Director at Citadel Investment Group and, from 2001 to 2008, as Senior Managing Director at Bear Stearns, where his agency MBS and global rates research team was regularly ranked by Institutional Investor. He has also held senior positions at Freddie Mac and Morgan Stanley.

Steve holds a B.S. from Northwestern University and a Ph. D. from Columbia University. He teaches as an adjunct professor in the finance division at Columbia Business School. He is also the author of The Bear Stearns Quick Guide to Mortgage-Backed Securities, Competitive Advantage in Investing: Building Winning Professional Portfolios, published by John Wiley & Sons, and most recently Santander’s A Quick Guide to CLO Debt and Equity.

Steve has helped launch the market in specified agency MBS pools (1994-1995), the first agency mortgage credit risk transfer (1998), the first application of the Capital Asset Pricing Model to CLO manager performance (2018) and the first trading of FHA-only mortgage pools (2020).