In 1982, Mike Adam, a scholarship student who had dropped out of Magdalen College, Oxford, took a backroom job in his father’s sugar broking firm in London.

The new job entailed drawing commodity price charts by hand and tracking the brokerage’s trades. To save time, Mr Adam programmed the first computer to arrive in the firm’s offices to do the job for him. Soon, overcome by curiosity, he began to test whether the computer could be coded in such a way that he could make money from trading patterns.

Together with his close friend from university, Marty Lueck, who was a programmer, and David Harding, a Cambridge-educated scientist fascinated with finance, he designed a trading system. At its heart was a simple concept — financial markets exhibit trends, and computers can be programmed to spot those trends and profit from them.