Who writes
My name is Federico, and here I am the Zeta ant. For a living I write software at one of the world's largest consulting firms: systems of large organisations that must work all the time, where a mistake is not an opinion but a line in a log. That job taught me the most useful thing I know about markets: before you trust something, test it.
Where all this comes from
I came to the markets like almost everyone: first out of curiosity, then passion, then with a real account. And like almost everyone I did things in the wrong order: first I traded, then I learned to measure. I chased signals, I believed in chart patterns, I closed trades by hand when price went against me, I trusted backtests that knew the future without my noticing. I lost money doing what everybody does. None of those losses was large in euros; all of them were large in lessons.
The turning point was a programmer's question: what if I measured it? That is where the lab was born: a way to run every idea through five gates, with the rules written before looking at the numbers, the broker's real costs, and bar-by-bar execution as a bot would do it. Over the months the classic indicators went through it (millions of simulated trades: none holds), chart patterns, zones and fair value gaps, the signals of four Telegram channels checked tick by tick, the methods of a few famous champions. The verdicts end up in the guides as I write them. The honest result is that almost nothing that is sold works, and that what works is slow, boring and has more to do with costs than with timing.
The lab, today
The work has three parts. A macro analyst that every morning reads the picture, measures the theses and records the moves with date and time: that is the public record of the signal room. A news agent that, one hour before the releases that matter, writes its forecast and is graded afterwards: that is the report card. And a test bench open to anyone who wants an idea measured. The account I trade with is small, and I say so: this project does not sell returns, it sells verifications.
The assistant: how I use artificial intelligence
Working alongside me is Claude, an artificial intelligence by Anthropic. I say it openly because I believe this is the right way to use it: not to be told what to buy, but as a very fast colleague who nevertheless has to prove everything. The rules between us are written down and always apply: every number is verified by running the code, never from memory; the rules of a test are declared before the results; when something is not known, we write «we don't know»; nothing runs hidden on my computer; decisions are mine, once I have understood. In these months it has dismantled more of my ideas than it has confirmed, and that is exactly the job I ask of it. This site too we built together, line by line; and every number you read here has passed through a checker that rejects anything not found in the data.
Why «Formica Zeta»
Z is my initial and the last letter of the alphabet: I set out last, like the ant in the fable. The cicada sings and promises; the ant carries home one grain at a time and counts every one. The rest of the name is told by the record.
Where we stand
At the beginning, and I write it in normal type. No automated strategy has yet passed all the gates. The analyst's record is a few weeks old. The news agent has made its first forecasts. The VIP room does not exist and will open only beyond a publicly declared threshold. If in six months the numbers are good, you will see it here before I tell you. If they are bad, likewise.
If you want to write to me, the way is the contact page. If you want to see the numbers, the signal room is open to everyone. Who I am in full, name and surname, is written in the legal notice: here I prefer to be the ant.