Kieran Duff on building a one-person systematic trading desk

Kieran Duff, systematic portfolio manager and Head of UK Growth at Darwinex, joins Sokio to talk about running a multi-strategy book across FX, metals and indices, built and managed on his own.  We get into why he quit discretionary trading, how he turns any idea into a backtest (including a Friday-red, Monday-long S&P system he dropped because it had no capacity), what BOJ intervention did to a long-running USD/JPY breakout strategy, and the incubator and governor layer that decide which trades actually reach the market.  Plus: moving everything to market orders with spread and slippage filters, how Darwinex works, splitting orders to raise capacity, CFDs vs futures and A/B-book brokers, his one-loss-a-day rule, and why new traders should let the data build the thesis.00:00 Intro and his path into trading 08:41 Why he went fully systematic 18:33 Regime change and a USD/JPY breakout 23:30 The incubator and the governor layer 30:01 Execution filters and raising capital  38:26 Scaling capacity with futures and order splitting 43:49 CFDs, futures and A/B-book brokers 48:50 Correlation limits and one loss a day 53:38 Advice for new systematic traders