When he was 14 years old, Jacob Taggart, ’28, was reading the Wall Street Journal and noticed something peculiar: Netflix had missed its quarterly earnings. While most 14-year-olds wouldn’t have given this headline a second glance, it sparked a potentially profitable idea for Taggart.
“I figured that big companies or Fortune 100 companies that missed their earnings reports would bounce back eventually because they have a strong user base and strong revenue,” he said.
This idea created Remora Capital, a student-run group that does research on investment, coding and AI. They aspire to start a quant fund where people give them money to invest using the algorithm they plan to create.
Taggart said he wanted to start testing his ideas in high school, but he lacked the means to do so. But that changed when Taggart came to Washington and Lee last fall. After arriving on campus, he said that he realized quickly that the resources the university provided would help him finally test his theory.
Besides the unlimited Box storage, access to financial databases and news outlets, and even classes themselves, Taggart said he saw that he was surrounded by other intelligent and driven students.
As soon as the orientation week trips ended, he began recruiting students with both interest in investing and coding and the willingness to take a risk. Soon, Remora Capital was born.
After a semester and a half, the group has accumulated eleven members with designated roles.
“I’ve divided the team into fundamental analysis, technical analysis, statistical analysis and computer analysis or AI,” Taggart said.
He said that technical analysis involves finding trends in previous price data, fundamental analysis is finding the true value of a company, and computer analysis is building the investing algorithm.
The group hopes to build something that will eventually earn a profit after or even before graduation.
“In five years, I think we would want to have scaled this into a sizable hedge fund,” Taggart said. “I would consider doing this full-time if that’s possible.”
The team’s goal in the short term has been to learn as much as they can using the free resources the university provides.
“When working with limited time, we’re going to need to do a lot more with less time,” said Luis Tercero Herman, ’28, the lead coder of the group.
To utilize the time they have, the club holds weekly Sunday meetings with all members and then works in compartmentalized groups for the rest of the week.
Within their groups, non-coding members spend most of their time reading scholarly articles and discussing what they have learned with regard to the topic they specialize in.
For example, Carter Zavitz, ’28, estimates that he has read around 100 articles over the course of the last term and a half. Taggart said he believes he has read over 2,000 within the past four years.
He said he thinks that Remora Capital has acquired almost all their knowledge from their own research as opposed to being taught. He said he taught himself how to use Python to work on the algorithm.
Zavitz said he believes that the group’s closeness will be vital to their future success.
“I saw an article a few weeks ago,” Zavitz said. “It said the number one cause of unproductivity in the workplace is people being distant from their managers or not having a personal investment in it.”
