Florian Philippi
🇱🇺Luxembourg· Luxembourg
It always motivates me when someone is better than me because I'm thinking: I will be there soon.
Florian Philippi closed 2024 at +311% on an audited $20K-$1M Enhanced Growth account, third in the division behind Brandon Frenchak's +482.6% and Anindo Majumdar's +389.3%. The 2024 EG podium is the cleanest engineer-track-record case study USIC has produced in the modern era: three engineering-background traders, all on real-money smaller-account EG entries, all with audit numbers above +300%. Philippi was at the time the only non-US-native on the podium, trading through a year in New York City while keeping his day job as a data engineer.
The arc behind the audit started at 15, when he got hooked on trading through his father's library: the Market Wizards series, William O'Neil and Mark Minervini. He chose a Finance bachelor purely because of trading, kept coding on the side, joined Minervini Private Access in 2019, and by 2023 had saved enough capital to trade actively. The NVDA breakout from a textbook VCP in January 2024 was the trade that convinced him to enter USIC at all. After the championship year he quit the corporate path, moved back to Luxembourg in September 2025 and founded Dataraum, an AI platform that lets companies and AI agents understand their business data. The 2025 season delivered the counter-lesson: up +190-200% mid-year, he gave back to around +120% after staying at full size through a market change, and now trades by a new rule: reduce size even after a winning streak.
Philippi is active on LinkedIn, where the USIC result sits pinned in his Featured section, and reachable, which he proved by answering our full interview. For trading-tournaments.com his profile matters as the trading-as-second-career archetype: a data engineer with a verified +311% audit who still calls full-time trading his ultimate dream, even while building a startup in the middle of the AI wave.
Interview
What would you tell yourself at the moment you were boarding the plane from Germany to New York, knowing what you know now?
It was always a dream of mine living in NYC and I wanted to get out of my comfort zone in Luxembourg and have a change of scenery. I'd tell myself to not second guess my decision, trust my instincts more and sooner. That year (and my beautiful girlfriend) is actually what gave me the conviction to quit my corporate job afterward, to start my own thing rather than stay on the safe path. I moved back to Luxembourg last September with many good memories from my time in NYC.
You had a background in Finance and Computer Science. How did these two disciplines mix in your head: did you always know you would work at the intersection, or did it happen on its own?
As a teenager I was into gaming and computers, which eventually got me into coding. I love building things. When I was 15 I got hooked on trading after reading books from my dad's library, namely the Market Wizard books, Mark Minervini, William O'Neill and more. Then after high school instead of studying CS, I decided to study Finance for my Bachelor only because of my interest in trading. For my masters and then in my career I always enjoyed combining both worlds and working at the intersection.
When did you start trading? Was it a conscious decision, or did you just start and not notice how you got hooked?
When I was studying in my early 20's. I saved a couple of hundred Euros and started day trading the DAX index with CFDs. I studied a lot of charts and books over the years (William O'Neill and Mark Minervini's books + few classics) but it wasn't my focus. In 2019 I became a Minervini Private Access member and started trading a little bit, mostly watching the markets and learning. In 2023 I saved enough capital to start trading actively.
Which one trade in 2024 do you remember most vividly, the best or the worst, and why that one specifically?
I saw NVDA developing a perfect VCP in December '23 and it made me decide to participate in the USIC. I bought the breakout at the beginning of January and this first winner out of the gate gave me the confidence to do great that year. A similar one was TSLA in May/June, I didn't take any trades in the previous 3-4 months. I was waiting for the perfect setups and got aggressive on them.
