Systematic · Evidence-led · Founder-funded

Personal capital first.
External capital follows proof, not promises.

A founder-led systematic trading technology company. Every order intent checked at decision time. Every fill audit-logged at execution. Built for durability, not optics.

30 years leading enterprise technology programmes AT Oracle, Cisco and ServiceNowINTO HSBC, Lloyds, JP Morgan and Reuters at board level. The same discipline now governs every algorithm on this platform. Commissioned Officer, Royal Air Force.

Proprietary capital live · institutional-grade infrastructure · audit chain operational
Constrained possibility
from d4
Multi-instrument fleet Uncorrelated families Hard 0.5–1% per-trade risk 10% drawdown circuit-breaker Operating principles published

The problem with most prop

The strategy is not the differentiator. The audit trail is.

Every prop firm runs the same playbook. A backtest curve. A discretionary war story. A track record that ends conveniently. The strategy is not the constraint. The constraint is whether anyone — investor, regulator, you — can verify what actually happened. Most can't. We built the verification layer first.

~80%
of retail prop accounts blow up within 12 months. The structural pattern: unaudited overrides, no enforced position limits, recovery-mode logic that quietly compounds losses.
Industry estimate · multiple prop firm public statistics
2 yrs
is the median lifespan of a "systematic" fund built on a single strategy family. Regime change kills it. Diversification is structural or it's cosmetic.
Hedge fund attrition data · widely reported
0
is the number of independently verifiable execution audit trails most retail-facing trading shops can produce on demand. Track records get curated. Fills don't lie — if they're logged at the moment they happen.
Empirical · ask any prop firm for fill-time audit access

Why existing approaches fail

Same instruments. Different discipline.

Every category solving the same problem — "make money in markets" — arrives at a different operating discipline. The discipline determines who survives the next regime change.

Discretionary trader
Black-box algo shop
Offshore prop fund
IPQI
Decisions in the head. Risk overrides under pressure. Track record reconstructed retrospectively. No reproducibility
Strategy works until it doesn't. No one inside the firm can explain why a particular trade fired. Drawdown response: hope. No interpretability
Performance reported quarterly, opaquely. Audit access nonexistent. "Trust us" as the operating model. No verifiability
Every order intent checked against a policy envelope at decision time. Every fill PostgreSQL-logged at execution. Risk parameters defined in calm, structurally enforced in volatility. Trust by construction

How it works

The architecture

A structured workflow with disjoint scope between code-writing and review-writing systems — epistemic independence — with one director reviewing and approving every consequential decision. No agent approves its own output. No human writes trading code directly. The writer of the truth is the gatekeeper.

01 — TRIANGULATION · DISJOINT-SCOPE REVIEW CODE-WRITING SYSTEM Strategy implementation Cannot see review context DIRECTOR · DECISION AUTHORITY Orchestration · evidence weighting Absolute veto · audit at gate REVIEW-WRITING SYSTEM Adversarial review Cannot see implementation context 02 — HUMAN AUTHORITY GATE One director reviews every strategy, risk parameter and deployment decision No agent approves its own output · absolute veto at every stage 03 — LIVE EXECUTION · MULTI-INSTRUMENT · MULTI-STRATEGY Multiple uncorrelated strategy families running concurrently across major FX and supporting instruments Structurally diversified, not cosmetically — tested against simultaneous-stress scenarios Promotion gauntlet: each strategy must pass an evidence threshold before live deployment Institutional-grade broker infrastructure · FIX-grade order routing 04 — THREE-LAYER RISK MANAGEMENT Position limits · circuit breakers · news blackouts · structurally enforced · cannot be overridden 05a — PROPRIETARY CAPITAL Director's own capital · institutional broker · PostgreSQL-audited 05b — EXTERNAL VALIDATION Prop framework testing · institutional risk parameters 06 — DARWINEX ZERO · INVESTOR ACCESS PATHWAY FCA-regulated venue · verified track record · external capital pathway POSTGRESQL AUDIT LAYER Every gate decision · every fill · immutable · append-only

Risk philosophy

Capital protection first.

Every constraint is structurally enforced. Cannot be overridden in live deployment. Parameters defined in calm, enforced in volatility.

What we do
  • Hard position limits — maximum risk per trade enforced at the infrastructure layer
  • Tiered circuit breakers — three independent layers, each capable of halting trading
  • News blackouts — trading pauses automatically around high-impact events
  • Promotion gauntlet — no strategy goes live without passing an evidence threshold
  • Regime awareness — strategies activate only in conditions they were designed for
What we never do
  • No martingale — position size never increases after a loss
  • No grid trading — no averaging down on open positions
  • No recovery mode — losses are accepted, never chased
  • No opaque systems — no capital in strategies that cannot be understood, tested and governed
  • No pressure overrides — the parameters set in calm cannot be relaxed in volatility
Hard constraints
0.5–1.0%
Max risk per trade
Structurally enforced · no override path
4% / 10%
Daily loss / max drawdown
Full halt on breach · mandatory review before resumption
Gated
Strategy promotion
Evidence threshold required before live deployment
Stress-tested
Diversification
Tested against simultaneous-stress scenarios — not cosmetic

Why now

The regulatory window for informal AI in finance has closed.

MiFID II algorithmic trading controls, the FCA's algorithmic governance expectations, the EU AI Act's high-risk system requirements, and DORA operational resilience mandates all reward the same operating discipline: structural enforcement, decision-time auditability, named accountability. Building that retroactively is expensive. Building it from day one is the entire point.

Algorithmic trading governance

MiFID II RTS 6 and the FCA's algorithmic trading expectations require firms to demonstrate pre-trade controls, kill-switch capability, and full audit reconstruction of every algorithmic decision. Built into the architecture, not bolted on.

EU AI Act · high-risk systems

Financial AI systems making consequential decisions face transparency, logging, and human-oversight requirements that come into full force August 2026. Trust by construction is the design pattern that satisfies them by default.

DORA operational resilience

Live across UK and EU financial services since January 2025. Mandates incident logging, ICT risk evidence, and recoverability testing. PostgreSQL-immutable audit chains are exactly what DORA expects firms to produce on demand.

SR 11-7 / SS1/23 (model risk)

The transatlantic standard for model risk management. Independent validation, mutation-aware testing, named accountability. The triangulation principle — code-writing and review-writing systems epistemically independent — is a structural answer.

Regulatory timeline
Jan 2025
DORA live — operational resilience mandates across UK and EU financial services
Feb 2025
EU AI Act — prohibited AI practices provisions in force
Aug 2026
EU AI Act — full high-risk system requirements in force
Ongoing
FCA AI guidance — third-party inference risk active supervisory consideration; algorithmic trading governance expectations under MiFID II RTS 6

For sophisticated investors

What you'll ask. Already answered.

The diligence questions that separate a serious investor conversation from a pitch-deck one.

Show me the audit trail

Every order intent, every gate decision, every fill is PostgreSQL-logged at the moment it happens. Immutable, append-only, queryable. Not reconstructed quarterly — written at execution time.

Where's the founder's money?

In the same account, on the same strategies, at the same risk parameters as anything external capital ever touches. Personal capital first. Skin first, then story.

What stops a blow-up?

Hard 0.5–1% per-trade risk. 4% daily loss / 10% drawdown circuit-breakers. Structurally enforced — no override path under pressure. The system that stops you cannot be argued with.

How do I verify the strategy?

Operating principles, risk constraints and gating discipline are public on this page. Strategy IP itself is proprietary — teasers and architectural detail available under NDA. Strategies are concept-tested, evidence-gated and stress-validated against simultaneous-shock scenarios before deployment. No black boxes — but no open-source alpha either.

What's the regulatory exposure?

IPQI Ltd trades its own capital and does not manage third-party funds. Future investor access will be facilitated solely through Darwinex Zero (Tradeslide Trading Tech Limited, FCA-authorised, FRN 586466) — a separately regulated venue. The architecture is built for what's coming.

Why does this scale?

Disjoint-scope agentic engineering means strategy generation, validation, and review can run in parallel without degrading correctness. Adding instruments and families is a capacity question, not a discipline question. The discipline holds at scale.


Investor access

Capital pathways.

Personal capital first. Verified track record second. External capital only when the evidence warrants it.

Phase 1 — Now
  • Proprietary capital live — director's own, fully at risk
  • PostgreSQL audit trail — immutable from day one
  • External validation in progress — institutional risk-parameter framework
  • SEIS seed round open — HMRC Advance Assurance application in progress
Phase 2 — Track record
  • Systematic expansion across uncorrelated instruments and families
  • Darwinex Zero track record accumulating — FCA-regulated access
  • EIS follows SEIS — up to £5m at 30% investor relief
  • External capital follows proof, not promises
Seed funding · SEIS
⧖  HMRC Advance Assurance · Application in progress · April 2026

50% tax relief. Uncapped upside.

One of the most tax-efficient investment structures available to UK investors. The UK Government recently expanded SEIS eligibility as part of its commitment to backing early-stage technology companies.

50% income tax relief On £25,000 invested, £12,500 returns immediately via your tax return in the year of investment.
Capital gains exemption Zero CGT on gains after 3 years of holding qualifying shares.
Loss relief Losses can be offset against income tax. Effective downside materially reduced.
What you are backing Equity in IPQI Ltd. A platform built to institutional standards from day one. Raise details shared with qualified investors on request.

Minimum investment £25,000. Conversations with serious investors welcome now.

Discuss SEIS investment →
Darwinex Zero · investor access

Verified track record. Regulated venue.

IPQI intends to make its strategies available via Darwinex Zero — FCA-authorised, independently audited, no fund complexity, no minimum ticket sizes. Track record is accumulating now.

FCA-regulated venue Performance independently verified by Tradeslide Trading Tech Limited (FRN 586466) and published in real time.
Risk-normalised exposure Darwinex standardises risk regardless of underlying strategy volatility.
No lock-up. No minimums. Allocate what you choose. Withdraw when you want.
Structural diversification Multiple uncorrelated families — tested against simultaneous-stress scenarios. Genuine, not cosmetic.
Register interest →

About

The foundation.

Constrained possibility
from d4

Process over intuition

A career built on delivering complex, high-stakes technology programmes into the world's largest institutions. Ian Pratley co-founded Alldare — advanced AI for defence and government — with the consortium delivering its first MoD AI contract within six months of founding.

IPQI applies the same framework: structured process, hard constraints, evidence before action. No exceptions under pressure. The discipline that operated at board level in global banking now governs every algorithm on this platform.

Same principles, same engineering, applied to client problems → ipqi.work


Contact

Production is not a strategy problem. It is a trust problem.

Proprietary capital live. Track record accumulating. SEIS seed round open. Not a broad solicitation.

Serious investors, strategic counterparties and selected technical collaborators only. Be specific about what you want to discuss.

Or direct: hello@ipqi.co.uk

Message received.

We'll be in touch if there's a fit.