n1c0.net

About

If you're here, you probably came from LinkedIn or my CV. And I really appreciate the curiosity. This is where you get to know me as a human, not just a resume.

I've had big failures. Made money, lost money. Made bad choices, focused on the wrong things, lost momentum more times than I'd like to admit.

But not failing would be like building risk measures without having data during crises. You'd have no idea if they actually work when it matters.

Let me back up.

I've always been a builder. Started with Legos as a kid, and never really stopped. Just changed what I was building with.

In 2019, I started studying Economics and Finance at Bocconi. One semester in, COVID hit and goodbye uni life. Suddenly I had time and curiosity but nowhere to go, so I started building things.

First it was scrapers to monitor COVID case numbers. Then I got into tracking hard-to-find items: monitors, dumbbells, PS5s, swimming pools, whatever was impossible to buy during lockdown. Built scrapers for Amazon, Decathlon, and a dozen other sites, running 300k+ requests per day.

What started as a personal project turned into something bigger. I built a small community, a closed group of friends who became like a second family during that weird isolated period. I provided them with custom monitors and tools. And I was beating monitors built by groups with thousands of paying members (€50 each) and full dev teams. I felt like Jim Simons with a secret sauce, honestly.

The people in the group generated over €100k in profit for themselves across niche markets. Though for ethical reasons, we never touched anything health or life-related. No masks, no sanitizer, none of that.

The bubble eventually burst, as these things do. But by then I was spending my last semester in Barcelona: beautiful experience, rediscovered social interaction, finally got to live the real uni life again.

My bachelor's thesis was a prototype tool for running Martingale strategies on XAU/USD in MetaTrader. Probably not the smartest trading approach, but it worked as a learning exercise.

Then I met a guy who sold me very hard on Switzerland. And I bought it.

After graduating, I enrolled in a Master's in Finance at USI (minor in Quantitative Finance). The projects got more interesting: scraping Twitter to build sentiment-based portfolios for S&P 100 stocks, building a trading bot on Interactive Brokers, and developing a Python package for portfolio analysis. Automatic rebalancing, efficient frontier optimization, custom metrics, Monte Carlo simulations and much more.

That last project? We really aced it. Told the professor we wanted to apply everything from theory directly to code, to real markets. He replied saying we made his day. But honestly, he made ours. The project got presented to the next year's class.

Summer 2024, I interned at Mediobanca. They had me working on client onboarding documents: tedious, repetitive stuff that took a week for every new financial advisor coming from other banks. I automated the entire process. Brought it down to about an hour. Seemed like a better use of everyone's time.

Spent last semester at the University of St. Gallen. Crazy amount of cows, crazy amount of highly motivated students. Mostly though, I finally understood what my mom had been saying my whole life: "You'll miss the student days." Moms are always right, aren't they?

Started looking around for what's next and found a position at Helvetia: automate a whole process, possibly using LLM models. As you've probably figured out, I love automating stuff, and it was time to discover AI and how to actually use it. It's on everyone's mouth these days, no?

Same day as my interview, the Baloise-Helvetia merger gets announced. Wow, what timing. Anyway, got the offer and started my Master's thesis on LLMs and embedding processes. Built an automated system for streamlining their RFP process using NLP and semantic search. Turned a multi-day manual task into something that takes minutes.

But curiosity doesn't stop at 5 PM. Weekends and evenings, I've been working on something else: scraped every possible stock price that's ever existed, filtered the database (which now occupies my entire hard drive), and I'm currently running simulations on 100,000+ randomly generated portfolios to analyze how risk and performance metrics evolve over time. We're talking 1980 to 2025, across different market regimes.

But since I said I'd be more human here, I need to actually be more human.

I really sold myself well up there. And honestly, it's not fair to leave it at that.

The failures I mentioned at the start? They weren't abstract.

Made money, then lost money. Made friends, then lost friends. Life gives and takes back. Lost potential profits, lost money on bankruptcies when I was 22. Crazy, right? Made bad choices, focused on the wrong things, lost momentum more times than I'd like to admit.

But Rome wasn't built in a day. Neither is a life.

And that risk measure analogy I used? I meant it. The failures taught me more than the wins ever did. You learn what actually works when things break, not when they're going smoothly.

Life isn't a smooth path. It goes up and down. But long-term? It trends up if you keep building.

Still building. Still learning. Still here.

Currently based in Switzerland, figuring out what's next.

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