The main outlet for musings and recommendations of Wall Street’s top-ranked mortgage strategy team at UBS AG (UBSN.VX: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) is being silenced after more than 15 years, according to several market sources.

UBS strategists led by Laurie Goodman late on Tuesday published their last official “Mortgage Strategist,” a weekly collection of research that sought to demystify complex issues related to residential and commercial mortgage debt, and make trading recommendations for investors, the sources said.

The move follows UBS’s announcement last week that it would eliminate another 2,000 jobs at its investment bank, including cuts in its real estate and securitisation businesses. A push by the Swiss bank into riskier mortgage assets such as subprime home loans has resulted in write-downs of $42 billion, the most of any bank in Europe.

Goodman launched the Mortgage Strategist while at Paine Webber in 1993, building its reputation after the firm’s acquisition by UBS in 2000, said Linda Lowell, a co-founder of the publication who now runs mortgage consulting firm Offstreet Research LLC.

Investors voted Goodman and her team No.1 in mortgage strategy for the past nine years in the annual Institutional Investor survey, according to the magazine.

“Laurie and her group absolutely set the standard,” Lowell said. “The Strategist was read in every shop. All the competition got it from customers within hours of its distribution.”

It was not immediately clear whether Goodman or other strategists would leave UBS.

Source: Reuters