It is the portfolio manager I wanted to become, rebuilt as software I can actually use.
I first began investing when I was thirteen years old with my first brokerage account on Stockpile, where every buy or sell required approval from my father.
To be completely frank, my initial draw to investing was more akin to a gambler discovering a casino for the first time than a Christian finding a Bible. I wanted to trade. I wanted action. I wanted to feel like I had somehow discovered the adult world's cheat code.
Thankfully, my father was the pit boss.
He rejected my dumb instinct-based trades and only let me make investments he himself would have been willing to make. Although I was not really in control, the semblance of being in control was enough to ignite a passion in me. I wanted to become a portfolio manager.
What this meant to thirteen-year-old me, you ask?
Buying and selling stocks for rich people while wearing a suit and looking nice. Watching charts and pulling triggers.
Over time, my perspective on investing shifted radically. Rather than seeing the market as a casino of blinking charts, I began to see investing as one of the most practical ways to create long-term financial security and stability.
The most pivotal shift came in economics class in high school.
That was the first time I saw a compound interest graph that actually stuck with me. The example was simple: one investor puts away $5,000 a year from age 25 to 35 and then never contributes another dollar. Another investor starts later and puts away $5,000 a year from age 35 to 65.
The person who started earlier invested far less money in total, but because the capital had more time to compound, they could still end up with more money by retirement.
That triggered a fundamental shift in my perspective.
Before that, I was still in the FOMO mindset. I wanted to find the next Nvidia. This was a serious thought I had in 2016: finding the next NVDA. It was, in fact, NVDA.
But the lesson was not that I should have bought Nvidia. The lesson was that "finding the next big thing" is not a process. It is hope with a ticker symbol attached.
I wanted to become an investor who used math to create defined goals and endpoints. I did not know what that math was yet, but I knew enough about Buffett and others to know it existed. I knew that the company itself, in some regards, was only part of the picture. Underlying fundamentals existed that could make "good" companies bad investments and "boring" companies great ones.
That idea gave me a strange kind of freedom.
If all I had to do was secure a job that let me put away $5,000 a year from 25 to 65, and if that money could compound intelligently over time, then I did not need to become a Wall Street portfolio manager to become financially secure. I just needed financial literacy, income, discipline, and time.
Of course, I still let this realization lead me directly into finance.
In hindsight, I probably should have gone further down the data or computer science route. I was always more interested in building tools, analyzing systems, and creating my own workflows than in the traditional finance recruiting game.
My collegiate finance experience was mostly reinforcement learning and tangent discovery. By sophomore year, I was managing real pro formas and handling financial and managerial accounting work for my mom's construction owner-representation company. A lot of what I learned in investment analysis were concepts I had either already learned independently or had started implementing while building Pythia.
I did well in school. I graduated magna cum laude. But not well enough, or not positioned well enough, to make the resume stick out and break into high finance.
That was a hard lesson.
I thought genuine interest and determined effort would be enough. I thought putting my head down, building things that showed clear interest in the subject, doing well academically, and working hard would speak for itself.
It does not.
To any current finance majors, I am here to tell you: join the clubs, be active in them, build a network, and do it with intent. It does not matter if it is your last semester, get involved now. Take it from a magna cum laude graduate with 200+ applications and very few meaningful replies: being driven, interested, and capable are the bare minimums now.
You need people.
That is not an AI thing. That is not even purely a finance thing. That is a career prospects thing. You need people. You need visible involvement. You need proof that you can operate in the social machinery of whatever industry you are trying to enter.
I was too nerdy for the traditional finance path and too finance-focused to fully commit to the technical path early enough.
I am now working in an accounting role within a developer and hospitality group. Although I am not where thirteen-year-old me thought I would be, I look back and realize two very important things.
First, the cause of my grief was believing I had determinant outputs from subjective inputs. What even is "hard work" in relative terms? Did I work harder and perform better than a large portion of my peers? Maybe. But did I work harder, network better, position myself better, and perform better than the students who actually landed the banking, investment firm, and asset management roles? Probably not.
Second, the whole reason I got into finance was to build financial literacy. The original idea was that if I became financially literate, I could choose almost any career path and still create financial security and stability later in life.
So there is no real reason to be down.
I have already put away my first $5,000 for the year into my brokerage account and consider it gone. I hope to put another $10,000 to $15,000 in by year-end. That is not a savings account. That is long-term capital I do not plan on touching.
A portfolio of green longs, aged like fine wine.
That is where Pythia comes in.
Pythia is not something I built because I wanted to launch a generic retail investing app or sell subscriptions to strangers on the internet. It is much more personal than that.
Pythia is my practical application of everything I have learned about investing, financial modeling, business analysis, data, automation, and portfolio monitoring. It is the investment analysis system I built for myself because I wanted a better way to think.
Over time, I added user mechanics and customization so my dad and stepbrother could use it too. But at its core, Pythia is my own investing operating system.
It is my attempt to automate and improve my analysis flow: financial statement review, ratios, risk metrics, earnings analysis, valuation work, qualitative research, portfolio monitoring, and saved commentary. It is the tool I wish I had when I first realized that investing was not supposed to be a casino.
One of the first public-facing pieces I am sharing is an interactive compound interest matrix and graph. You can click any cell in the matrix to change what appears on the graph. It shows different combinations of average annual return and yearly investment compounded to age 65. You can also modify the settings to change the years capital is invested, contribution windows, and assumptions.
The point is simple: a few percentage points matter. A few years matter. Process matters.
Pythia is my attempt to make that process better.
Not to magically predict the market. Not to guarantee some fantasy return. But to give myself a better shot at turning the basic 8% compound-interest lesson that first changed my perspective into something closer to a 12-15% long-term aspirational outcome through better analysis, fewer emotional decisions, and a more disciplined portfolio process.
That is what this app is.
It is not a casino.
It is not a school project.
It is not a pitch deck pretending to be a company.
It is the portfolio manager I wanted to become, rebuilt as software I can actually use.