This article was penned by CAPIS

Last week we held our January research call, this time featuring Geoff Garbacz, co-founder of Quantitative Partners, who actually started his career with CAPIS. Geoff contributes to our Morning Note daily and discusses what he keeps an eye on in markets. 

Our own Dave Choate, COO & Executive Director of Sales and Trading, started the call with some advice that would be well heeded in today’s markets: “When trading at or near the open when retail volume is the highest, use limits and avoid aggressive algorithms, because the aggressive algos will trade right through these price anomalies. And you’ll see that in your average price.”

Little did we realize at the time, though, how prescient Dave’s and Geoff’s comments on markets would be — Geoff spent a good deal of time talking about evaluating heavily shorted equities. 

Even if you had never heard of the r/wallstreetbets subreddit (a trading specific community on reddit.com, the message board of the internet) prior to the headline-grabbing market activities of the threads’ participants, heavily shorted names that have seen record activity were discussed on the call since Quantitative Partners utilization of Erlanger “squeeze” indicators. (Quantitative Partners represents Phil Erlanger Research products and during the call highlighted Blackberry and fielded questions on Gamestop.)

Want to get a head’s up on what to eye in the markets of the day? Sign up for our Morning Note here. For questions or to learn more about CAPIS, please reach out to [email protected] and follow us on Twitter (@capisinc) and LinkedIn for more updates and insight from our team.