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George Gosbee, Chairman and CEO of Alta Corp Capital at the first annual Alberta Economic Summit held at Mount Royal College on Saturday in CalgaryChris Bolin/The Globe and Mail

AltaCorp Capital Inc. is taking advantage of weak Canadian capital markets to hire a new institutional trading team as well as an industrials and transport analyst for its Toronto office.

Calgary-based AltaCorp has signed seven traders for a new market-making group in addition to its investment banking, capital markets, energy acquisition and divestiture and institutional sales units.

The move, which boosts the firm's staff to 50 in Calgary and Toronto, comes with several other investment banks shedding employees and even closing offices amid a drop in bread-and-butter financing and merger and acquisition advisory work.

"It's a good opportunity right now, when everybody's shutting down or pulling back from the market, and I've always liked that market-making space," AltaCorp chairman and CEO George Gosbee said in an interview.

"To hire not just one trader but a group of traders when the others are shying away from it, I think, is a great opportunity for us."

Market makers are dealers that take the risk of holding a certain number of shares of a given security to aid in its trading. They maintain firm bid and offer prices by being ready to both buy and sell.

The new team is led by Tony George, and includes Dave Tomlin, Andrew Menzies, Peter O'Connell, Albert Sheynzon, Ara Ghazarian, and Guy Daly.

In addition, AltaCorp, an affiliate of Alberta government-owned ATB Financial, hired Chris Murray, who will cover diversified energy industrials and specialty transport and aerospace companies in the Toronto office. Mr. Murray was most recently at PI Financial, where he was a founding partner of PI's Toronto office.

Mr. Gosbee, who made headlines last month as leader of a group that bought the Phoenix Coyotes of the NHL, believes the market is inching toward recovery, at least in energy deals. They have been scarce in 2013.

"You're not going to see the big takeovers that were happening, but you're going to see some more consolidation, you're going to see a new trend of joint ventures," he said. "At the start of the fall, to head out with a whole group of new traders and really dominate the energy space is what we're trying to position ourselves for."

Editors Note: An earlier version of this online story incorrectly said Chris Murray was a founding partner of PI Financial. In fact, he is a founding partner of PI Financial's Toronto office.

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