In a red-brick building in the suburbs of the English city of Cambridge, a group of young computer scientists chat and joke about the latest tweaks to their codes. But rather than a new iPhone app, they are attempting to create the next “ bond king” out of algorithms and data.

Dressed casually in jeans and T-shirts, Cantab Capital’s brainiacs — with backgrounds in fields such as astrophysics and molecular biology — are writing programmes that surf the undulations of the bond market. The aim: to copy the best features of human traders but without any of their foibles or frailties.

“An active credit trader is ‘feeling the tape’. We want our models to replicate that behaviour,” says Anthony Lawler, co-head of GAM Systematic, the arm of the Swiss asset manager that owns Cantab.