Artur Teregulov: 2016 Trading World Champion
Published January 4, 2017Artur Teregulov turned $10,000 into approximately $101,500 in the 2016 World Trading Championships futures division, posting an audited return of 914.8% — the second-highest verified result in the competition's 33-year history. Only Larry Williams' near-mythical 11,376% return in 1987 surpasses it. Teregulov was the first Russian trader ever to win the World Trading Championship, and he did it in a year that confounded most of the professional trading world. That combination of historic return, verified execution, and barrier-breaking achievement makes him the 2016 Trading World Champion.
2016 was a year that rewarded conviction and punished hedging. The S&P 500 gained roughly 10% but the path included multiple shocks that wiped out traders who were caught leaning the wrong way. Britain's vote to leave the European Union in June sent the pound to its lowest level in decades and triggered a two-day global equity selloff before a sharp snapback. Donald Trump's surprise election victory in November produced an even more dramatic sequence — US equity futures plunged more than 5% overnight, then staged one of the fastest reversals in market history as traders repriced growth, tax cuts, and deregulation in real time. Oil rebounded from sub-$30 lows to nearly $55. The Fed delivered its second post-crisis rate hike in December. The hedge fund industry averaged just 5.5% for the year, with legends like John Paulson losing 16% and Citadel's Wellington fund posting its worst result in eight years at 5.1%. In this environment, Teregulov didn't just outperform. He produced a return that most professional managers would consider impossible.
Teregulov traded futures contracts on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, focusing on directional positions in equity index and commodity futures. His approach was discretionary, built on technical analysis combined with an acute sense of macro timing. The Brexit and Trump events were the defining moments of the 2016 trading calendar — each one a binary outcome that produced massive directional moves in futures markets. Traders who were positioned correctly through those events had the opportunity to generate outsized returns, but the vast majority either hedged away their exposure or were caught on the wrong side. Teregulov navigated both events from the right side of the trade, compounding gains through a year-long campaign of aggressive but disciplined position management.
Based in Ufa, Russia — a city roughly 1,200 kilometers east of Moscow and about as far from the major financial centers as a trader can get — Teregulov represented a different kind of competitor. He was not a Wall Street professional or a City of London macro trader. He came from outside the established infrastructure of the global trading industry, competing on the same exchange and under the same rules as everyone else. He credited his team with contributing to the strategy development and trade decisions throughout the competition year, noting that the result was collaborative rather than purely individual.
The World Trading Championships, administered by Robbins Trading Company since 1984, requires all participants to trade real money through regulated US brokers with full third-party auditing of every position and every return. There is no paper trading, no simulated accounts, and no way to inflate results after the fact. In a year when social media was filled with unverified claims of Brexit and Trump trading profits, Teregulov's 914.8% was documented, audited, and real. That distinction matters enormously. The World Trading Championship has produced some of the most impressive verified trading results in history, and Teregulov's return places him in the top tier of all time.
The 914.8% figure demands some perspective. The World Trading Championship has been running for more than three decades, attracting professional and semi-professional traders from dozens of countries. The average winning return in a given year is typically in the range of 100% to 300%. Breaking 500% is rare. Breaking 900% has only happened twice in 33 years. Teregulov didn't just win the 2016 competition — he produced one of the most dominant performances the competition has ever seen, converting a modest five-figure account into a six-figure result through pure trading skill over a 12-month period.
Whether Teregulov would build on the World Trading Championship title to establish a broader trading career, launch a fund, or return to defend the championship remained an open question at the time of this writing. What was not in question was the 2016 result. In a year defined by political earthquakes, hedge fund underperformance, and unprecedented market volatility, the best verified trading performance on the planet belonged to a futures trader from Ufa, Russia, who turned $10,000 into $104,000 while the rest of the industry was trying to figure out what just happened. A 914.8% audited return. The first Russian World Trading Championship champion. The second-best result in competition history. That is what earned Artur Teregulov the title of 2016 Trading World Champion.
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Based on publicly available information as of Jan 2017. About our process.