Kevin McCormick: 2021 Trading World Champion
Published January 6, 2022Kevin McCormick posted a verified 253.8% return in the 2021 World Trading Championships futures division — the highest audited competition result of the year and the first time a US-based trader had taken the World Trading Championship futures title since 2015. In a year where the S&P 500 gained nearly 29% and meme stocks dominated the headlines, McCormick quietly put together one of the most impressive competition performances in recent World Trading Championship history by doing something that looked, on paper, almost reckless: shorting commodities in the middle of a commodity bull market.
2021 was a year that made a lot of traders look good simply for showing up long. Equities ripped higher on the back of roughly $5 trillion in fiscal stimulus, near-zero interest rates, and a post-pandemic reopening that supercharged consumer demand. Commodities surged. Crypto boomed, with Bitcoin touching $69,000 in November. The hedge fund industry averaged about 10.3% — respectable but unremarkable against a backdrop that rewarded almost any form of risk-taking. The harder thing to do in 2021 was to trade against the prevailing trend and still come out ahead. That's exactly what McCormick did.
McCormick executed over 100 trades during the competition year, with his best and most defining positions being short sells of commodity futures during a period when commodity prices were broadly surging higher. That's a contrarian approach in the purest sense — fading a trend that had strong fundamental support and picking spots where the market had overextended. The fact that he managed to extract 253.8% from a strategy built around counter-trend commodity shorts tells you something about his timing and risk management. Anyone can short a commodity. Doing it profitably in a bull market, over and over again across 100+ trades, requires an edge that most traders simply don't have.
McCormick competed in the World Trading Championship's regulated futures division, which requires live trading through a registered broker with full third-party auditing of all positions and returns. The World Trading Championships, administered by Robbins Trading Company since 1984, remains the only major global trading competition with fully verified real-money results. That verification matters because 2021 was also the year of inflated claims — with meme stock traders posting screenshots of unrealized gains and crypto influencers claiming impossible returns on social media. McCormick's 253.8% is audited. It's real.
His approach to the futures markets appears to be primarily discretionary, with a focus on identifying overextended moves in commodity contracts and trading against them with disciplined position sizing. In a year when the prevailing wisdom was to ride the commodity super-cycle and stay long everything, McCormick went the other direction. That kind of contrarian conviction is what separates competition winners from participants. The World Trading Championship attracts traders from around the world, many of whom are professionals with decades of experience. Beating all of them requires more than just good entries — it requires a framework for managing risk across a high volume of trades.
McCormick's win was significant in part because it brought the World Trading Championship futures title back to the United States after a six-year drought. The competition had been increasingly dominated by international entrants, and having an American reclaim the top spot added a layer of narrative to an already impressive result. The World Trading Championship has a deep history of producing traders who go on to long and successful careers — Larry Williams' legendary 11,376% return in 1987 remains the competition's high-water mark — and McCormick's 253.8% places him in strong company within that lineage.
Whether McCormick returns to defend the title or uses the World Trading Championship championship as a launching pad for a broader trading career remains an open question. What isn't in question is the 2021 result. In a year defined by speculation, retail frenzy, and easy-money momentum, the best verified trading performance belonged to a futures trader who made his money going against the crowd. A 253.8% audited return, built on contrarian commodity shorts, in a commodity bull market. That's what a Trading World Champion looks like.
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Based on publicly available information as of Jan 2022. About our process.