Freshman takes on stock market

Amanda Morris, Staff Writer

Inside a Founders residence hall dorm room lies the temporary office of Remora Capital, an investment company co-founded by Stern freshman Julian Marchese. The company, which Marchese founded with Yale sophomore John-Paul Pigèon, uses a program Marchese developed called the Technical Trend Reversion Model to track the stock market.

Currently, Marchese and Pigèon are working on obtaining investors and funding for Remora Capital. The two are in the process of raising capital and establishing their firm.

“Remora is a quantitative long/short equity fund, though we plan to roll out some discretionary global macro strategies down the line,” Marchese said.

Since buying his first stock at the age of 8, Marchese has been heavily interested in investing and the stock market.

“The market has always fascinated me because it is a constant intellectual battle,” Marchese said. “You need to know about finance, economics, history, politics, psychology, etc. to be successful. It forces you to learn about everything.”

Marchese made his first trade when he was 9 and started developing TTRM when he was 14. TTRM is a quantitative, long-short equity strategy that runs automatically on his computer using algorithms. It can make trades for him while he is otherwise engaged. It allows him to be a full-time student while still running the company.

“Our flagship trading strategy is an automated one so at this point we are setting up the infrastructure to accept capital, and run our systems on our AUM [assets under management],” Marchese said.

One of the challenges that Marchese has faced is running the company at his age, which he says has been a double-edged sword.

“It has been helpful in some instances as the novelty of my story has garnered interest from people, however some people naturally don’t take me seriously,” Marchese said. “However I find that after someone has a conversation with me on my craft, that mentality changes quickly.”

Even Marchese’s parents, who have been supportive throughout the process, underestimated him at first due to his age. When he made his first trade on their account, they canceled the order after finding out. The company was then bought out and the stock price tripled within the month.

Marchese said he has already learned from his experiences trading and investing in stocks.

“I’ve had many risk management lessons early in my career (between the ages of 11-15) where I took unfounded, big risks and lost money very quickly,” Marchese said. “Those experiences taught me the importance of having a plan for every trade, and understanding where my risk limits are, given the strategy I am employing.”

A version of this article appeared in the Monday, Dec. 1 print edition. Email Amanda Morris at [email protected].