Keep moving forward.
“No matter what, I’ll keep moving forward”
About
How I think.
Hi, I'm Simon!
Kansas City, KS / Waterville, MEMath, Econ & CS / Colby College2004 rapid
I love anything about the markets, technology, and large language models. I especially like finding tangible, useful ways to apply AI in our lives without impinging on the importance of what we do ourselves.
My whole name means 'to uphold' and 'of the highest standard' in my native language. I've tried to live up to that, pursuing my passions and whatever I do to the highest of standards.
Working on something cool? Get in touch!
Off the board
Other than chess, somethings I like to do in my spare time is play tennis and workout. I used to play varsity tennis #3 on my high school team and still keep up with the ATP Tour (Meddy fan). I also used to not be the healthiest individual and that really lead me on my gym journey starting in 2022 right after COVID and I now can bench 285 for 6!
Some other things that I haven’t gotten into and would love to is running, hiking, and meditating. I had a little meditation phase in high school but ended up not having enough time, excited to pick that back up whenever I have the time.
My Favorite Quotes
a.k.a. how I'm trying to live
Don't fool yourself.
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”
Set your heart ablaze.
“Set your heart ablaze.”
Train how you fight.
“You can only fight the way you practice.”
Philosophy
ideas I keep coming back to
Falsification over confirmation.
A claim earns trust by surviving attempts to kill it.
after Karl Popper
Nullius in verba.
Take nobody's word for it, including your own.
motto of the Royal Society
Bounded rationality.
Time and information are always scarce. Run the experiment that rules out the most per dollar.
after Herbert Simon
The limits of my language are the limits of my world.
A strict type system makes whole categories of confusion unsayable.
Wittgenstein
Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
Most blunders are failures of attention, not intelligence.
Simone Weil
Failures & lessons
The mistakes are all there, waiting to be made.
Kept on purpose.
The strategy that fees killed
Months of order-book infrastructure, clean features, a realistic backtester, and the spread edge was real, just ~1000× smaller than retail taker fees.
lesson · The infrastructure was never wasted; the conclusion was the product. Cost structure is part of the hypothesis.
IP-blocked mid-research
An exchange rate-limited and then blocked my IP partway through data collection. I was hitting their API too aggressively with no real throttling. Getting back in meant exponential backoff, local caching so I stopped re-requesting data I already had, and a pipeline restructured to respect their limits from the start.
lesson · Backoff, caching, and respect for the data source are part of the experiment design.
Mental health
When I was in 6th grade I lost my closest friend, my non-blood brother, to suicide. I not only lost him, I lost the ability to believe that a smile means someone is okay. That’s why mental health advocacy matters to me. I don’t want anyone else to disappear behind a ‘fine’ that nobody truly cared to dig deeper.
Toolbox
- Languages
- Python · Java · TypeScript · R
- ML / Data
- PyTorch · NumPy · pandas · RAG · Parquet
- Finance
- Financial modeling · Valuation / DCF · Power BI · Excel
- Engineering
- WebSockets · mypy · ruff · pytest · Next.js
At Colby: Student Investment Association · High Performance Computing Club (social chair) · Asian Student Association (board) · Colby Consulting Group.