Michael Kevin McCarty

Meridian Equity Partners, Inc. (MEP) is a registered, agency-only broker/dealer headquartered in New York City. The firm was founded in 2004 by Jon Acquafredda and Columb Lytle. MEP provides best-of-breed strategic solutions to the investment community for Equity, Option and Electronic Execution. The firm is a full-service trading on the NYSE floor and has access to all markets and liquidity pools. Their options desk specializes in accessing liquidity through their counterparty network, and also caters to high frequency and quantitative traders.

Founded in 1982, Morgan Joseph TriArtisan LLC, formerly Morgan Joseph & Co., Inc., is a full-service investment banking firm and broker/dealer headquartered in New York City. The firm was also previously known as Morgan Lewis & Co. Morgan Joseph TriArtisan is a subsidiary of Morgan Joseph TriArtisan Group, Inc. Morgan Joseph TriArtisan's primary focus is on providing financial advisory and capital raising services in the US, Europe and Asia. This includes mergers and acquisitions advice, restructuring advice, private placements and public offerings of debt and equity. For their institutional clients, Morgan Joseph TriArtisan provides a full range of sales and executions services, including equity research and specialized reports on convertible debt. The firm's sales and trading teams service a variety of institutional clients with both debt and equity investment ideas and trading services. Morgan Joseph primarily serves the consumer products, healthcare, automotive, chemical, transportation, construction, entertainment, telecommunications and media industries. Morgan Joseph TriArtisan's debt and equity analysts cover a growing universe of stock and bond issues across a broad range of industry sectors. Their equity research focuses primarily on middle-market companies with limited research and coverage and uses a classic bottom-up qualitative approach. The high-yield department specializes in finding trading opportunities by identifying undervalued and overvalued high-yield debt for institutional clients. They focus on small- to mid-sized issues that are not widely covered and are often mispriced in the market. Morgan Joseph TriArtisan is a member of FINRA, the NASD and the SIPC.

Cowen & Co. LLC is a SEC-registered broker/dealer headquartered in New York City. The firm was founded in 2004 and is a subsidiary of Cowen Holdings, Inc., ultimately owned by The Toronto-Dominion Bank (TSE: TD) in Canada. Cowen & Co. offers industry-focused investment banking for growth-oriented companies, domain knowledge-driven research and a sales and trading platform for institutional investors. Their institutional sales and trading business serves both equity and fixed-income clients. Sales and trading execution platform is structured around the following key verticals: (1) healthcare (2) technology, telecommunications and media (TMT) (3) REITs and financials (4) aerospace and defense (5) consumer and (6) alternative energy.

Founded in 2010, Differential Research LLC is an independent investment research firm located in Austin, Texas. The firm is an independent provider of derivative research specializing in US exchange-traded options and ETFs. They seek to capitalize on a growing demand for derivative based market commentary and analysis, the result of both a growing awareness of the importance of incorporating risk analysis in the investment process and the explosion in trading of derivative products.