Dr Martin Coward, a former director of quantitative hedge fund Ikos, may appeal today’s High Court ruling which declared that Ikos – set up by Coward’s estranged wife Elena Ambrosiadou – owns the computer software that runs the hedge fund’s trading platform.

According to a statement from Ikos, the High Court ruled that Dr Coward "had no ownership rights in the initial software first developed to trade Japanese Equity Warrants at Ikos Partners in the early-1990s nor in any of the subsequent development of the quantitative systems in use by Ikos".