Kieran Duff
I am a systematic trader. I write about how a live book is actually run: sizing, risk, drawdowns, regime shifts, and the decisions that sit behind the numbers.
The work
I run systematic strategies with live capital through Darwinex and boutique funds. The book went live in April 2025 and is built as a multi-strategy portfolio across FX, indices, and metals.
“If you can't write it down, you don't have a system.
How I got here
I started trading FX in 2018, first as a discretionary trader. I learned the hard way through mentors, mistakes, and a lot of time staring at charts.
In January 2025 I moved fully into systematic portfolio building. That shift was largely self-taught, helped by a friend's guidance and heavy use of LLMs to understand the concepts faster. AI helped me ask better questions, find holes in the logic, and move through the boring work with less friction.
Why I write
I write the things I wish someone had explained to me earlier: how to think about position sizing, when a drawdown means something, why a backtest can lie, and how risk behaves once separate strategies start moving together.
The letters are for retail traders trying to build a serious process without pretending this work is easier than it is. I am still figuring parts of it out. That is the point of writing it down.
What the letters cover
The focus is systematic trading craft: risk allocation, drawdown management, portfolio construction, regime detection, execution, automation, and the operator decisions that never show up in a clean equity curve.
I also write about building with AI when it touches the trading process. Useful tools, broken assumptions, faster research loops. Magic bot nonsense stays out.