2022 Trading World Champion Rankings

Ken Griffin generated $16 billion in net investment gains at Citadel in 2022, the largest annual dollar profit in hedge fund history — surpassing John Paulson's $15 billion subprime trade in 2007. The flagship Wellington fund returned 38.1% in a year where the S&P 500 fell 19.4% and the average hedge fund struggled to break even. Griffin founded Citadel in 1990 from his Harvard dorm room and built it into one of the most dominant financial firms on the planet.

What set Citadel apart in 2022 was breadth. All five of the firm's major strategies finished positive: equities navigated the tech crash with alpha on both sides, the rates desk profited from the historic bond selloff, commodities captured energy volatility from the Ukraine war, and quantitative strategies exploited dislocations across asset classes. The $16 billion wasn't the result of one big bet — it was the product of five distinct strategies all performing at the same time.

Citadel runs a multi-strategy model with semi-autonomous teams across equities, macro, fixed income, commodities, and quant, all under centralized risk management. The approach is designed to produce uncorrelated return streams, which means the firm doesn't need any single strategy to have a great year — it needs most of them to be positive. In 2022, every one of them was.

The $16 billion result pushed Citadel past Bridgewater Associates as the most profitable hedge fund of all time on cumulative net gains. Griffin's track record spans more than three decades, including near-death in 2008 and a ferocious comeback that now looks like the defining characteristic of the firm: Citadel has made money in virtually every market environment for over three decades. Full article »

Cliff Asness's AQR Absolute Return fund returned 43.5% net in 2022, the best year in the fund's history since its 1998 inception and one of the strongest quant performances of the year at any firm. After several painful years where AQR's value-oriented factor strategies suffered through a prolonged growth-stock bubble, the 2022 regime change was a massive vindication. Rising rates and the collapse of speculative growth names were exactly the environment AQR's models had been waiting for.

Asness, who earned his Ph.D. under Eugene Fama at the University of Chicago before founding AQR in 1998, had spent years publicly arguing that value factors were historically cheap and that mean reversion was inevitable. In 2022, that thesis paid off spectacularly. His raw percentage return was higher than Griffin's, but AQR's ranking at #2 reflects the fact that Citadel's $16 billion in absolute dollar gains on a diversified multi-strategy platform carries more weight in our framework than a single-strategy factor fund — even one that had a historic year.

Chris Rokos returned approximately 51% at Rokos Capital Management in 2022, his best year ever and one of the most impressive macro performances of the decade. The former Brevan Howard co-founder is one of the world's foremost interest rate traders, and 2022 was the ultimate rates year. With central banks hiking at historic speed, bond markets experienced their worst selloff in a generation — and Rokos was positioned on the right side of virtually every major move.

Rokos ranks third despite having the highest percentage return among the top three because our framework weighs the breadth and scale of the achievement. Griffin's result was produced across five uncorrelated strategies at massive scale, which represents a different kind of difficulty. That said, 51% from a macro rates specialist managing billions is an extraordinary result by any standard. His track record at Rokos Capital since launch has placed him among the most consistent macro traders in the world.

Stefan Seibert won the 2022 World Trading Championships futures division, making him a repeat champion after also winning the title in 2020. The World Trading Championship, administered by Robbins Trading Company since 1984, remains the only major global trading competition with fully audited real-money results. Winning it once is difficult. Winning it twice puts Seibert in elite company among competition traders.

Seibert's inclusion at #4 reflects the weight we place on verified, audited competition results. In a year dominated by institutional hedge fund managers with enormous capital bases, Seibert represents the other end of the trading spectrum — an individual competing against a global field with real money on the line, every trade tracked and verified. His repeat victory demonstrates the kind of consistency that separates professional-grade traders from one-time performers.

David Shaw's D.E. Shaw posted strong results across its major funds in 2022, with the Composite fund returning 24.7% and the Oculus fund gaining roughly 20%. In a year that crushed most equity-oriented strategies, D.E. Shaw's quantitative multi-strategy approach captured dislocations across markets while managing drawdowns tightly. The firm, which Shaw founded in 1988, manages over $60 billion and is one of the original quantitative hedge funds.

D.E. Shaw's approach blends systematic quantitative strategies with discretionary macro and fundamental analysis, running thousands of models across global equities, fixed income, currencies, and commodities. The 2022 results were strong but not flashy — which is exactly the point of the D.E. Shaw model. Consistent, diversified returns through any market environment. In a year that produced historic losses across most of the investing world, delivering 20-25% returns on tens of billions in capital is quietly one of the more impressive achievements on this list.