Gabriel Blanco
Gabriel Blanco, CPA
🇺🇸United States· Miami, FL
Ukrainian-Cuban-American Miami CPA who has been on the USIC leaderboard four years running — and runs a tax practice when the markets close.
Gabriel Blanco is a Miami-based CPA and sole proprietor of Real Accounting Solution. By day he helps businesses manage taxes, compliance, and financial controls. When the markets open, he competes in the US Investing Championship — and has appeared on its top leaderboard four years running: +108.3% in 2023, +218.7% in 2024, +239% in 2025, and +135.7% in Q1 2026.
Born in Ukraine and raised in Cuba, Blanco came to the United States with a mindset shaped by scarcity. His career in accounting — built at KPMG US, Carnival Cruise, 3Sixty Duty Free, and Vizcaino Zomerfeld LLP before founding his own practice — gave him a structural understanding of risk that most traders develop the hard way. His approach is discretionary swing equity selection in the USIC $20K-$1M Stock/ETF Division.
What makes his record unusual is its consistency. Most championship top finishers post a single breakout year before reverting to the mean. Blanco has held the line four consecutive times on a real-money audited account with a single methodology. Off the markets, he plays tennis and dances salsa.
Interview
Ukraine, Cuba, Miami, three countries, three very different economies. Which one shaped your relationship with money the most?
Definitely Cuba, and mostly in a negative way. Growing up in a place where almost everything is scarce creates a scarcity mentality. You learn to focus on not losing what you have instead of creating more opportunities. In my family, losing money was treated as a disaster, so taking any financial risk was often viewed as irresponsible.
As a CPA you spend your days managing other people's finances. How does that change the way you handle your own?
It actually created an interesting contradiction in my life. As a CPA, I spend my days helping people protect money. Budgets, controls, taxes, compliance, reducing risk. The job is largely about defense.
But when I looked at the people who became truly wealthy, very few did it by focusing only on defense. They built businesses, invested, took calculated risks, and looked for opportunities. So on personal finances, I tend to focus much more on offense.
Was there a moment when you almost quit trading? What kept you going?
Trading did not come naturally to me at all. I had many tough moments where I seriously considered quitting.
But at beginning, my biggest problem was timing. I would get excited after hearing stories about huge market rallies and traders making life-changing money. By the time I finally jumped in, the rally was often already near its peak. I would buy near the top, take painful losses, and convince myself that maybe trading wasn't for me.
Then a few months later, I'd see the market do it all over again. New stocks, new opportunities, new traders making money. That's when something clicked. I realized trading wasn't about catching one rally. It was about surviving long enough to participate in many of them.
Salsa and tennis both require coordination and reading the moment. Have you ever noticed a connection between those and how you trade?
The market has its own rhythm. Traders call them themes, cycles, trends, and momentum, but it's really the same idea. Some years it's AI, some years it's energy, some years it's small caps. The music changes, and the successful traders are the ones who recognize it early and adapt.
