When the three top finishers assembled for the 2013 World Cup Championship of Futures Trading® Awards Ceremony May 9 on the CME Group trading floor, three continents – North America, Europe and Asia – were represented. When the top three finishers assembled for the 2012 ceremony a year earlier, the same three continents were represented, but by different traders.
Coincidence? Or confirmation that World Cup Championship trading has truly international reach and appeal? A look at the trophy winners suggests the latter.
THE WINNERS
The 2013 champ: Erstwhile actress Victoria Grimsley from suburban LA , who stunned her friends by mixing it up with professional traders and amassing a 160% net return with a homegrown system. The runner-up: A Beijing native now living in suburban Detroit named Song Li who cites an MBA in Finance from Wharton Business School as the foundation of his trading acumen. The third-place finisher: A full-time professional trader from Germany, René Wolfram, who hop scotches Europe regularly to speak at high-profile trading seminars while juggling his personal trading.
Photo caption: Left to right: Second Place Finisher Song Li, Champion Victoria Grimsley and Third Place Finisher René Wolfram.
Phote source: Courtesy of CME Group, with permission.
Backtrack a year to the 2012 awards presentation to find a winner from Italy, a runner-up from Hong Kong, and a third-place finisher from the rural South Dakota. Thousands of miles apart, products of different cultures, they were all drawn to World Cup Championship competition for the same reasons: To test their systems, to test themselves, to walk in the footsteps of legendary World Cup Trading champion Larry Williams.
“I became aware of the competition many years ago and kept tracking it,” says Grimsley, a mother of two and Screen Actors Guild member who has toured as a dancer, worked as a magician’s assistant and appeared in commercials and independent films. “It was important for me to enter because it was a way for me to validate my system. Plus, being a monitored competition, it was the perfect way to see if I could stay true to my system or if I would start getting emotional.”
Keeping emotions in check, she bested runner-up Li by 41% and became only the second woman in the competition’s 30-year history to capture a World Cup Trading Championship title. In an odd twist, it was another actress who preceded Grimsley to victory. Back in 1997, Michelle Williams, who would later become an Academy Award-nominated actress, followed a bond-trading strategy of father Larry Williams and registered a 1,000% return to claim the futures-trading title. She entered to commemorate the 10-year anniversary of Larry’s astounding performance in the 1987 competition, when he ran a $10,000 account to $1,147,607 for an 11,376% net return.
The Williams aura caught Li’s attention, but it was self-assessment rather than a quest for notoriety that brought him to the competition. “I have been trading futures for several years and I wanted to see how good I am,” says Li, a Chartered Financial Analyst. “I believe the World Cup Championship is a perfect place to test my skills because it has the longest history in the industry and produced some legendary traders like Larry Williams.”
Wolfram also was inspired by Larry Williams and intrigued by the World Cup caldron. “I first heard about the World Cup Trading Championship in 2004, when Larry Williams told about his record-breaking competition in 1987,” he says. “I liked the idea of competing with the best traders from all countries in a one-year competition with real money, to prove how serious my strategies work compared with the approaches of hundreds of professional traders from around the world.”
“Around the world” is right. In the 2014 futures and forex competitions now under way, entrants hail from 21 countries: Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, Colombia, Czech Republic, England, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Poland, Russia, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland, Venezuela, and, of course, states across the U.S.
And it’s only May. The 2014 World Cup futures and forex events are yearlong competitions, and entries are accepted throughout the year, with a minimum of just 10 round-turn trades of any size required to qualify for trophies and prizes. Grimsley claimed the first-place pewter Bull & Bear trophy in 2013 after making her first trade in August.
Grimsley, Williams, Li , Wolfram and other World Cup winners offer leader-follower AutoTrade™ programs on www.worldcupadvisor.com.
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The 2014 World Cup Championship of Futures Trading & 2014 World Cup Championship of Forex Trading:
Official rules and funding requirements
World Cup Championship e-brochure
Current standings, archive
Prizes
Trading futures and forex involves significant risk of loss and is not suitable for everyone. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results. World Cup Championship (WCC) accounts do not necessarily represent all the trading accounts controlled by a given competitor. WCC competitors may control accounts that produce results substantially different than the results achieved in their WCC accounts.
