It was a non-ministerial department, an executive agency and a trading fund, and recovered its costs from the other departments, executive agencies and publicly funded bodies which used its services.
When a futures trading fund under his management incurred significant losses in the stock market crash of 1987 he retired from trading for several years.
The fund was a quantitative trading fund targeted at sophisticated institutional and long-term investors for a relatively small portion of their total assets.
But the worst aspect of trading funds is that it allows the counterproductive emotions of investing to supersede the productive economics of investing.