Production, MLOps, regulation, career and capstone.

Software engineering for trading

• 7.1.1 Project structure and configuration (Pydantic Settings, YAML); Ruff, pre-commit, pytest, tests with simulated brokers.
• 7.1.2 Performance: profiling (the Python 3.15 sampling profiler), Numba, Cython; Rust (PyO3) as background.
• 7.1.3 Patterns: event-driven, message queues (Redis, ZeroMQ, Kafka), hexagonal architecture.

Infrastructure and deployment

• 7.2.1 Docker and docker-compose; reproducible images with uv.
• 7.2.2 VPS or cloud (AWS, GCP, Azure, Hetzner) close to the broker's or exchange's servers; CI/CD with GitHub Actions.
• 7.2.3 Orchestration (cron, Prefect, Airflow, Dagster) and monitoring (structured logs, Prometheus and Grafana, alerts, heartbeats).
• 7.2.4 Security and continuity: secrets, 2FA, IP allowlists, backups, procedures for broker, data or network failures.

MLOps for trading models

• 7.3.1 Experiment and model tracking (MLflow, Weights & Biases); data versioning (DVC).
• 7.3.2 Scheduled retraining, automatic validation and champion/challenger deployment.
• 7.3.3 Monitoring drift and live performance; automatic deactivation.
• 7.3.4 Serving models: ONNX, CPU or GPU inference, the cost of LLMs in production.

Regulation, ethics and taxation

General information for Spain and the EU, with a global view. It is not advice.

• 7.4.1 MiFID II: client classification (retail or professional), suitability and appropriateness; algorithmic trading requirements for firms (RTS 6) as background.
• 7.4.2 ESMA and CFDs: maximum leverage for retail clients (30:1 on major currency pairs; 20:1 on non-major currencies, gold and major indices; 10:1 on other commodities and indices; 5:1 on equities; 2:1 on crypto), position close-out at 50% of margin and negative balance protection.
• 7.4.3 PRIIPs and KID: why an EU retail investor cannot buy US-domiciled ETFs; alternatives (UCITS, options, professional client status).
• 7.4.4 MiCA: the transitional period in Spain ended on 1 July 2026; trade only with authorised or passported CASPs; checking the CNMV and ESMA registers.
• 7.4.5 Market abuse (MAR): spoofing, layering, manipulation; why a badly designed bot can engage in them.
• 7.4.6 Taxation in Spain: IRPF (Spanish personal income tax) savings base (19% up to €6,000; 21% up to €50,000; 23% up to €200,000; 27% up to €300,000; 30% above that), the two-month rule for repurchases, loss offsetting (4 years; 25% cross-offset limit), FIFO for crypto, Modelo 720 and 721 (foreign asset and crypto declarations), withholding at source and double taxation treaties.
• 7.4.7 Ethics: personal data and GDPR, scraping, responsible AI, conflicts of interest in selling “signals”.

Quant career

• 7.5.1 Roles: quant researcher, quant developer, quant trader, data engineer, risk quant, ML engineer.
• 7.5.2 Where to work: hedge funds, prop firms, banks, asset managers, market makers, crypto, fintech; the Spanish and European ecosystem.
• 7.5.3 Public portfolio (GitHub, blog, Numerai, Kaggle) and interviews (probability, statistics, coding, brainteasers).
• 7.5.4 Certifications and continuing education (CQF, EPAT, CFA, FRM, master's degrees); independent trading and prop firms, and their risks.

Final capstone

40 to 80 hours. Choose one of these projects and defend it before a panel:

• C1 Multi-asset futures system (trend, carry and spreads) in NautilusTrader with paper trading at IBKR.
• C2 Systematic options book (premium selling with tail hedges), volatility surface and real-time Greeks management.
• C3 Equity and ETF portfolio with ML (cross-sectional ranking with LightGBM, HRP and rebalancing with costs and Spanish taxation).
• C4 Research platform with LLMs and alternative data (RAG, text signals and an analyst agent with guardrails).
• C5 Crypto market making or arbitrage with ccxt, funding and basis, and counterparty risk control.

Common requirements: reproducible repository (uv and Docker), documented data, anti-overfitting validation (walk-forward and CPCV or Deflated Sharpe), risk report, at least four weeks of paper trading, monitoring and technical report.