In early 2021, in a modest room in rural Tuscany, David Materazzi ran a trading bot so hard he fried a high-end CPU.
He didn’t call IT. He didn’t shut it down. He opened a window to let out the smoke, booted up a backup machine, and continued running backtests.
This wasn’t an accident. It was the result of hundreds of hours of stress testing Galileo FX — not to prove it worked, but to see where it broke. He simulated slippage spikes, broker outages, flash crashes, mismatched candles, and order rejections. Some tests ran nearly 1,000 times. And when the hardware failed under the load, it was seen as progress.
The system didn’t break. The machine did.
Since then, Galileo FX has grown into one of the most downloaded retail trading bots on MetaTrader platforms, now used by over 10,000 traders. It boasts more than 200 strategies and has logged results like +1,311.99% in 7 months — independently verified via MyFxBook. Materazzi remains sole owner and has turned down acquisition offers, including one worth €15 million.
But for those close to the project, it’s that early episode — the smoke, the silence, the backup laptop — that still gets mentioned most often.
What People Take From It
The interpretations vary depending on who you ask.
At a small coworking space in Berlin where a handful of algorithmic traders meet monthly, the story is sometimes retold half-jokingly, as a kind of urban legend.
“Didn’t he melt the CPU with backtests?” one quipped over espresso.
“He was probably mad it didn’t break the bot,” another replied.
Then, a pause. “Still, that’s what you want. A guy who pushes until something fails.”
In a Telegram group for Galileo FX users, it’s seen differently. More personally.
One trader from Indonesia, who said he’s using the bot to rebuild savings after a failed restaurant business, messaged:
“He broke his machine before letting it break us. That matters to me.”
In London, a former institutional quant, now running a private desk, put it more bluntly:
“It’s a small detail, but it says everything. Most trading tools are optimized to sell well. This guy optimized to survive. That’s not common.”
Even within his own company, staff members have different views. A former product manager described the incident as “a little bit obsessive,” but added:
“Obsession is why the thing works. It’s why people trust it. Because it wasn’t tested for comfort — it was tested for chaos.”
Beyond the Machines
What makes the story stick isn't the technical specs. It’s not the processor or the fan or even the backup laptop. It’s the picture of someone quietly working alone, trying to break what he was building — not because he doubted it, but because he didn’t.
It’s the idea that trust, in something as fragile as a retail trader’s capital, should be earned not with branding or backtest screenshots — but with a melted processor and a willingness to keep going anyway.
In a world where most tech founders pitch vision, David Materazzi wrote code, waited for the hardware to give out, then pressed “Run” again.
And that’s why, years later, long after the charts and press releases and data pages, people are still talking about that burned-out computer — and what it says about the guy behind the bot.