2023 Trading World Champion Rankings

Darren O'Neill is the 2023 Trading World Champion. The founder of Vector Ridge delivered standout multi-asset performance in a year defined by AI mania, banking turmoil, and extreme market concentration. While most of the industry chased the Magnificent Seven, O'Neill generated returns across a diversified book of futures positions spanning equities, commodities, and currencies.

O'Neill's approach is rooted in multi-asset discretionary trading with an emphasis on risk management and position sizing. He competes in the World Trading Championships, where all results are audited by third-party brokers, and has built a track record across multiple years and competition formats.

What earned O'Neill the top ranking in 2023 was the combination of absolute returns, the breadth of markets traded, and the quality of risk-adjusted performance in a year where narrow concentration punished most diversified strategies. In a field that included a 492% World Trading Championship futures winner and $12.9 billion in TCI gains, the editorial selection weighed the totality of the trading year.

O'Neill continues to trade and compete through Vector Ridge. Full article »

Ivan Scherman won the 2023 World Trading Championships futures division with a staggering 492% audited return — the 9th-best result in the competition's 40-year history. Trading through a fully algorithmic system, Scherman turned $241,360 into $1,428,728 in under 11 months while keeping his maximum drawdown to 26.2%. He became the first Latin American to win the World Trading Championship, a milestone for a region that has produced relatively few competition traders at this level.

Scherman is the CIO of Emerge Funds Investments, a 100% algorithmic hedge fund he has led for 17 years with an average annual net return of approximately 23% for clients. He holds both CMT and CFTe designations. His approach is rooted in data science — building quantitative models that identify tradable patterns in futures markets. The 492% figure is remarkable not just for its size but for the systematic discipline behind it: this was not a discretionary trader taking one big bet, but an algorithm executing a defined strategy across the full calendar year. In most years, that number would be an easy #1 pick. In 2023, it earned him #2.

Chris Hohn's TCI Fund Management returned 32.7% in 2023, generating $12.9 billion in investor gains — the most of any single hedge fund globally. Hohn earned approximately $2.9 billion personally, topping the industry's annual Rich List. This was a bounce-back year after TCI lost 18% in 2022, and the recovery was driven by an extremely concentrated portfolio: just a handful of positions in infrastructure and defense names that caught the AI-adjacent capital expenditure wave.

What makes Hohn unusual in a field of diversified multi-strategy funds is the concentration. TCI runs fewer than ten core positions at any time, with individual stocks frequently representing 15-25% of the portfolio. That approach amplifies both gains and losses, and 2023 was squarely on the gains side. The $12.9 billion figure is staggering at any scale — more than Citadel, Millennium, or D.E. Shaw generated individually. Whether Hohn is a "trader" in the traditional sense is debatable, but at this level of returns on this much capital, the distinction hardly matters.

Philippe Laffont's Coatue Management had a standout 2023, with the hedge fund returning 21.5% and the long-only fund surging 55%. Laffont was early and aggressive on the AI thesis, positioning heavily in the semiconductor and cloud infrastructure names that defined the year's market leadership. As a Tiger Cub (alumnus of Julian Robertson's Tiger Management), Laffont brings decades of experience in technology investing to a market that increasingly rewards tech-sector expertise.

The spread between Coatue's hedge fund (21.5%) and long-only (55%) returns tells an interesting story: the short book cost performance in a year where nearly everything in tech went up. That's the inherent tension in long/short investing during a strong bull market. Still, 21.5% is a strong absolute number, and the long-only result demonstrates that Laffont's stock selection was among the best in the industry. His ability to identify which AI-adjacent names would benefit most — before the trade became consensus — is what earned him a spot on this list.

Patrick Nill won the 2023 World Trading Championships forex division with an audited return of 237.2% — a remarkable result in a market where most participants struggle to beat 20% in a given year. Based in Germany, Nill traded currency pairs through the World Trading Championship's verified real-money format, navigating a forex landscape dominated by central bank divergence and dollar strength.

A 237% return in forex is exceptionally difficult to achieve because currency markets typically move in smaller ranges than equities or commodities. Generating that kind of performance requires either high leverage, precise timing, or both — and doing it over a full calendar year while surviving the drawdowns that come with aggressive forex trading is what separates competition winners from everyone else. Nill's result earned him the Bull and Bear trophy and a spot in the World Trading Championship record books.