Behind the DARWIN: Guy on Casino Maths and building VRHD

Guy runs VRHD, an intraday algorithmic portfolio on Darwinex Zero. In the second episode of Behind the DARWIN he tells Blayn how a software engineering career, casino maths and two decades of trading mistakes shaped a fully systematic process: every idea tested by computer, every algorithm proven out of sample, and no decisions made during the trading day.

Key takeaways

• VRHD runs up to 23 algorithms, with 16 live at the time of recording. Every trade opens and closes within the day.
• Guy learned probability, expected value and variance by studying blackjack and roulette before he traded seriously.
• An entry has to show an edge at a 1:1 ratio before he goes further. Varying lot size or stop and target can hide a martingale.
• Nothing reaches the portfolio unless it holds up on data it was never optimised on.
• He pauses trading around major releases like CPI, even when the release would have paid him.

Watch the full interview on YouTube

Who is the trader behind VRHD?

Guy is a software engineer who studied computer science at school in the late 1970s and has been self-employed since 1989. He co-founded Homes Online, a UK property portal, in 1996 and exited in 2016. A mortgage lead business he built alongside it was wiped out by the 2008 crash.

He sees that history as preparation. Businesses that go well, go badly or break taught him that nothing moves in a straight line.

How did casino games teach him to trade?

Blackjack is beatable with card counting, and studying it gave Guy a working feel for probability. He learned what a drawdown feels like when you live through it rather than look at it on a chart.

"But for me it is all about understanding risk and understanding probability and understanding expected value and all of those things." 5:53

His first real edge came from a retail binary option product, automated in Excel 2003. It worked for a couple of years. Looking back, he credits the broker's fixed payout for the edge more than his own analysis. When the product was banned in the UK and Europe, that income stopped.

Why does he test every idea by computer?

Guy still starts with his eyes. He scrolls back through charts on a demo account and writes down rules. Then he codes them, because he found that his manual backtests were badly out once a computer checked them.

"It's very very important to make sure that you test that thoroughly using a computer because a computer doesn't suffer from confirmation bias." 16:43

His first filter is strict. He strips out the spread and checks whether the entry has an edge on a straight 1:1 basis.

"There's a danger that really what you're doing is a kind of martingale and it's not a true edge. You just kind of got lucky in the data set." 19:03

Every trade risks the same percentage of the account, so the edge has to come from the entry.

How does he avoid overfitting?

He optimises on an in-sample window of around three years. That is only the start.

"So, it has to be outside of that sample and proving a return and not drawing down more than the in sample as well." 56:54

Most ideas fail at this stage. Live, he tracks each algorithm's drawdown against what testing said to expect. If one breaks its expected range, something has changed, so he pauses or reoptimises it.

What does the VRHD setup look like?

Signals come from ProRealTime, which Guy rates as the fastest place to prototype. A Python script reads those trades, sends them to his VPS and places them in MetaTrader within a second, across several accounts at once. Execution runs through a trade manager he wrote himself in MQL4 and MQL5.

All positions open and close between midnight and 21:00 London time. He would rather miss a profitable gap than hold through a weekend he cannot control.

"There are no decisions that I make during a trading day. I just watch it run." 25:48

What would he tell his younger self?

Learn when to stop. Guy's tenacity carried him through business failures, but he warns it can also keep you on the wrong road.

"Don't get married to a process. Don't get married to even a business." 1:12:53

He started VRHD on Darwinex Zero to build a verified track record that can attract investor capital. His reading recommendations are Mark Douglas's Trading in the Zone and Jonathan Livingston Seagull, the book his computer science teacher gave him at 16.

Watch the full interview

The full episode includes the live review of VRHD and how Guy handles his first real drawdown since allocations arrived. Watch Behind the DARWIN with Guy on YouTube and join the Darwinex Zero Discord to put your questions to him.

Building your own track record? Start on Darwinex Zero.

FAQ

What is VRHD?

VRHD is Guy's DARWIN on Darwinex Zero. It is a fully algorithmic intraday portfolio of up to 23 strategies, with signals generated in ProRealTime and executed in MetaTrader. Every position closes before the end of the trading day.

How do you know a backtest is not overfitted?

Test it on data the optimisation never saw. Guy only adds an algorithm if it makes a return out of sample without drawing down more than it did in sample. He also checks the entry has an edge at a 1:1 ratio before adding stops, targets or sizing.

Should you trade through major news releases?

For intraday systems, slippage on releases like CPI or non-farm payrolls can push a loss well past its planned size. Guy suspends trading around them and accepts that he will sometimes miss the upside.

Is Darwinex Zero a prop firm?

No. Darwinex Zero lets traders build a verified track record that can attract investor capital through Darwinex, an FCA-regulated asset manager. There is no challenge to pass.

Thanks for watching, 
Darwinex Zero. 

*Darwinex Zero and the domain www.darwinexzero.com are trade names used by Tradeslide Technologies, a company registered in the United Kingdom under number 14398381.

The contents of this blog post and video are for educational purposes only and should not be construed as financial and/or investment advice.