Paul Skarp: 2025 Trading World Champion
Published January 5, 2026Paul Skarp posted a verified 256% return in the 2025 World Trading Championships futures division — the highest audited competition result of the year and one of the strongest World Trading Championship performances in recent memory. That number alone would put him in the conversation. But what made Skarp's year stand out wasn't just the final tally. It was the way he got there, trading aggressively through one of the most volatile environments in a decade and coming out the other side with a result that nobody in the field came close to matching.
2025 was not an easy year to trade. Tariff announcements moved markets in both directions, sometimes within the same session. The Fed cut rates but kept forward guidance deliberately vague, creating a rates environment that punished anyone with a fixed macro view. Equity indices finished the year higher but the path was rough — drawdowns exceeding 5% hit multiple times, and the dispersion between winners and losers was extreme. Hedge funds as an industry posted their best collective year since 2009, generating over $540 billion in investor gains. But for every fund that had a career year, another one got caught on the wrong side of a policy reversal.
Skarp traded futures across multiple asset classes through a US-based brokerage account, concentrating risk during periods of maximum dislocation. His equity curve peaked above 330% at one point before a significant drawdown brought the final number to roughly 256% at year-end. That drawdown would concern most observers, but context matters: he still finished more than 100 percentage points ahead of second-place finisher Allen Swiontek, who put up a very strong 146% in his own right. The margin of victory tells you something about the magnitude of the moves Skarp caught during the year.
Not much is publicly known about Skarp's background prior to the 2025 championship. He entered 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 audited real-money results — which is why it carries outsized weight in our rankings. Anyone can claim numbers on social media. Skarp's are verified.
Based on the publicly available performance data, Skarp appears to be a discretionary futures trader who favors directional bets on index and commodity contracts. His approach involves aggressive position sizing during high-conviction setups, a style that produces both large returns and large drawdowns within a given year. In a competition where many entrants deliberately trade small to avoid catastrophic loss, Skarp clearly traded to win. Whether that approach is sustainable over multiple years is an open question, but in 2025, it worked better than anything else in the field.
The 2025 World Trading Championship futures division was one of the deeper fields in recent years, with five traders finishing above 48% and the top three all clearing 76%. In that context, 256% isn't just first place — it's a historically significant result. Competition years with this level of participation and this quality of finishers make the winning result more meaningful, not less. Skarp didn't beat a weak field. He beat a good one by a wide margin.
Whether Skarp returns to defend in 2026 remains to be seen. Plenty of World Trading Championship champions have treated the title as a one-and-done accomplishment. The ones who come back and do it again are the ones who end up in the conversation about the best to ever compete. For now, the 2025 result speaks for itself: 256% audited, real money, in a year that broke a lot of traders who thought they knew what they were doing. That's what a Trading World Champion looks like.
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Based on publicly available information as of Jan 2026. About our process.