Rob Citrone: 2024 Trading World Champion
Published January 3, 2025Rob Citrone returned 52% at Discovery Capital Management in 2024, the best result among global macro hedge funds and one of the most impressive risk-adjusted performances of the year at any scale. In a year where the S&P 500 returned roughly 25% and the average hedge fund made about 16%, Citrone doubled the index and tripled the industry average — while running a style of trading that most people in finance consider the hardest there is. That's why he's the 2024 Trading World Champion.
2024 was a year that rewarded conviction and punished indecision. Equity markets ground higher for most of the year, driven by AI enthusiasm and resilient corporate earnings. But the real action was in macro: central banks diverged, with the Fed holding steady while other central banks cut. Emerging markets swung wildly on political transitions. The election cycle in the US created a late-year volatility spike that caught plenty of funds off guard. Through all of it, Citrone was positioned on the right side of the biggest moves.
The trade that defined Citrone's 2024 was Argentina. When Javier Milei took office with a radical free-market agenda, most institutional money stayed away — the country had defaulted too many times, the peso was in freefall, and the political risk was enormous. Citrone went in early and went in heavy, taking significant positions in Argentine government bonds and equities. His stake in Grupo Financiero Galicia SA paid off spectacularly as the stock surged over 260% during the year. But Argentina wasn't the whole story. Discovery's short book also generated meaningful alpha independently, and Citrone ran macro positions across rates, currencies, and credit that all contributed to the final number.
Citrone is a Julian Robertson protégé — one of the original Tiger Cubs who came out of Tiger Management in the 1990s and went on to build their own firms. He founded Discovery Capital Management in 1999, initially focusing on emerging markets before broadening into global macro. Unlike many Tiger Cubs who evolved into pure equity stock-pickers, Citrone kept the macro toolkit and uses it aggressively. He trades across asset classes, takes country-level bets, and isn't afraid of positions that look contrarian or uncomfortable.
Discovery's approach is fundamentally driven but macro in scope. Citrone combines top-down macro analysis — where is the economy going, what are central banks doing, where are the political inflection points — with bottom-up security selection when he wants specific exposure. He's comfortable in sovereign debt, corporate credit, equities, and currencies, and he'll use all of them in a single theme if the setup warrants it. The Argentina trade was a perfect example: he expressed the view through government bonds, bank stocks, and currency positions simultaneously.
This wasn't a one-off year. Citrone has been one of the more consistent macro performers over the past decade, though 2024 was clearly the peak. Discovery has navigated multiple market cycles since 1999, generating strong returns during periods of dislocation while avoiding the catastrophic drawdowns that have ended other macro funds. His personal earnings of approximately $730 million in 2024 placed him ninth on the industry's highest-earner list — ahead of managers running funds many times Discovery's size.
What separates Citrone from the other strong performers in 2024 — and there were several — is the nature of the returns. A 52% gain from macro trading requires being right about big, uncertain things. It's not stock-picking in a rising market. It's not a systematic strategy harvesting small edges across thousands of trades. It's a human being reading the world and making large, concentrated bets on what happens next. When that works at this level, on this scale, for someone with this track record, it's the best trading in the world. That's what the title means.
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Based on publicly available information as of Jan 2025. About our process.