About

I was born in 1997 in Brescia, northern Italy, to Moroccan parents who arrived there at the start of the nineties. I spent the first twenty-one years of my life in that city.

I live in Kraków now. I work in market abuse surveillance at Capital.com and I'm married to a Polish woman. Five languages, none of them chosen on purpose — they came with the moving. If you're trying to place me in a category, I'll save you the effort: there isn't one that holds.

For a long time I treated that as a defect. Too Italian in Morocco, too Moroccan in Italy, foreign in Poland. Then I understood something fairly obvious that took me twenty years to see: not belonging fully to any group means seeing every group from the outside. And from the outside you notice things that are invisible from within. This broader perspective has been key in my life.

What I do

My job, stripped to the bone, is to watch financial markets and work out when someone is doing something they shouldn't.

The remit runs across the whole catalogue of market abuse — insider dealing, pump and dump schemes, spread narrowing, and everything adjacent. Around ten cases a week cross my desk.

So let's put it plainly: if you're thinking about breaking the law and placing that trade, think again. Someone is always watching, whether you know it or not.

Before this, three years of trade surveillance at UBS in Kraków. I escalated more than 150 high-risk trading activities across equities and derivatives, and cut false-positive alert rates by around 30% by writing the tedious parts in Python — roughly 200 analyst hours a month handed back to actual analysis. I left on an Associate Director promotion.

Insider dealing is the one I've learned to read best. It's rarely dramatic. What gives it away is almost never the trade itself — it's where the trade sits on the clock.

It taught me something that reaches well past finance: almost nothing important announces itself. It gets inferred. The things that matter show up in the margins, in the anomalies, in what doesn't add up — never in the press release. Despite what popular belief says.

What I write

I've been writing since 2022 — twenty-eight pieces so far, mostly on Medium, and collected here.

The themes keep returning to the same three: how you build an identity when you didn't inherit a clear one, what happens when self-improvement quietly becomes another way of avoiding yourself, and how much of what you take for your own thinking is really just the room you're standing in.

My writing style evolves as I do. I write from slightly further along the same path, turning around to say: look, I've just worked something out.

Why this page exists

I'm interested in expanding my luck surface area — collaborations, new friendships, conversations that go somewhere. I'm not job-hunting and I'm not selling anything. If that resonates, drop me an email 🍀

I answer everyone.