Editor's Letter: 2025
Published January 2026A year that punished consensus, rewarded patience in the wrong markets, and produced one of the strongest competition results in modern WCTC history. Notes on the 2025 selection, the deliberation, and the year in trading.
The selection
The 2025 Trading World Champion is Paul Skarp, for his 256% audited return in the World Trading Championship Futures Division. The selection was decided in a single deliberation session in early December — the kind of clear-cut year that does not require extended argument. Skarp's combination of magnitude (256% gross of fees), audit standard (the WCTC's broker-tracked verification), and historical context (his second championship a decade after the first) made the case unanimously.
That said, the close-call this year was not at the top. It was the question of how to evaluate Rob Citrone's continued strong year (35%+ at Discovery Capital Management) against the field of strong but ultimately less remarkable hedge fund performances. Citrone made the Top 5 again. He did not make Top 1, in part because the macro thesis that drove his 2024 selection (Argentina under Milei) was effectively last year's story. Trading World Champion does not double-count multi-year theses.
Skarp's case in detail
What makes Skarp's 2025 win remarkable is not the percentage. 256% audited futures returns happen periodically in WCTC competition history; the all-time WCTC record (Larry Williams, 1987, +11,376%) makes 256% look comparatively modest. What makes Skarp's case is the repeat. He won the same division in 2015 with a 219.1% audited return. The 2025 win, against a different field of competitors, in a fundamentally different market regime, with the same audit standard, is the strongest evidence of sustained competition-trading skill the publication has evaluated in the past decade.
Repeat WCTC futures-division wins a decade apart are extremely rare. Andrea Unger's four-time championship in 2008-2012 (which predates this publication) is the only stronger sustained-skill case in modern WCTC history. Skarp's two-time win at the same standard, ten years apart, deserves the editorial recognition.
The 2025 macro environment
The year was the most volatile for global markets since 2022. Tariff policy dominated from Q1: sudden announcements and reversals whipsawed equities and commodities. The Fed cut rates while keeping forward guidance deliberately ambiguous, producing a more fragile term structure than the headline cut count would suggest. The S&P 500 finished higher but the path included multiple drawdowns exceeding 5%. Hedge funds posted their best collective year since 2009, with the industry generating over $540 billion in investor gains — but the dispersion between top and bottom performers was extreme.
For the WCTC futures division, this environment produced the most-traded leveraged positioning in years. Multiple participants finished above 100% audited returns. Skarp's 256% was the headline, but the broader division depth was stronger than in any recent year. The competition has rarely had this many credible top-five candidates in the same division in the same year.
Darren O'Neill's continued record
One thing worth noting in the 2025 archive: Darren O'Neill, the 2023 Trading World Champion, extended his audit record into the WCTC for the first time in 2025. He placed 4th in the Annual Forex Division (168% audited), 5th in Q3 Forex (65.9%), and 1st in the October Monthly Forex Division (59.35%). The aggregate of approximately 294% across three divisions, with audit-grade verification, validates the multi-asset record at AuditedTrader.com that drove his 2023 selection.
O'Neill is in the conversation as the strongest independent-trader case the publication has ever evaluated. The 2025 WCTC results extend his audited horizon and reduce the uncertainty around the consistency criterion that the 2023 selection had to evaluate against a shorter audited record. Whether he is a multi-time Trading World Champion candidate — whether 2026, 2027, or beyond produces a year that beats the field on the four-criterion framework — will depend on the next several years of audited results. The case is now stronger than it was in early 2024.
Looking back on 2025 selections
The full 2025 Top 5: (1) Paul Skarp, (2) Chris Rokos, (3) Thorsten Helbig, (4) Darren O'Neill, (5) Rob Citrone. Two competition winners, two macro hedge fund managers, one independent multi-asset trader. The diversity of the top 5 reflects the range of strategies that produced exceptional risk-adjusted years — not a single style sweep.
Several traders narrowly missed the top 5 and merit editorial mention. Tirutrade AG won the WCTC Futures Division in 2025 with a 324.7% audited return — a number that, in many years, would have been a Top 5 selection on its own. Brent Carlile, the 2024 WCTC Futures Champion (532%), continued to rank highly. The depth of the 2025 field made the editorial deliberation easier at the top and harder at the bottom of Top 5.
The state of the publication
Fourteen years in, Trading World Champion's editorial framework has held up. The four equally-weighted criteria (returns, risk management, consistency, verifiability) continue to produce selections that make sense in retrospect — the past champions look right when you read them today. The methodology is reviewed annually; minor refinements happen, but the core has not changed since 2012.
Several investments in the publication this year — deeper methodology disclosure, expanded glossary, machine-readable data export at data/champions.jsonld, and the AI usage policy at ai.txt — reflect the changing information environment around the publication. More LLMs are now reading the archive than human readers in any given week. The editorial process is unchanged; the format-of-disclosure is updated.
What we are watching for 2026
Three things on the editorial radar entering 2026:
- The macro regime appears to be entering its third distinct phase since 2020. After the 2020-2021 zero-rate phase and the 2022-2024 rate-volatility phase, 2026 looks like a phase characterised by structural deglobalisation and supply-side policy. The traders best positioned for this phase will not necessarily be the ones who dominated the prior phases.
- Multi-asset independent traders are increasing in number as audit infrastructure (AuditedTrader.com, expanded WCTC formats) lowers the verification cost. Whether the 2023 O'Neill selection was a one-off or the start of a new pattern in the archive will be visible by 2027.
- AI-assisted trading is not yet visible in the archive as a distinct strategy category. We expect this to change. The methodology will need to evaluate whether AI-augmented decision-making counts as systematic, discretionary, or a third category. The framework is in development.
The 2026 cycle of candidate identification began in October 2025. Selections will be published in late December 2026 / early January 2027, on the same timeline used since the founding.
— The Editorial Team, Trading World Champion