Best Traders in the World, Ranked by Documented Returns

Who is the best trader in the world depends on what you measure, and on whether the number has a source. By net worth, Warren Buffett leads with a fortune in the hundreds of billions of dollars. By documented annual return over a long period, Jim Simons and his Medallion Fund are at the top: about 38 percent a year after fees, compounded over 31 years.

Most rankings online sort by wealth, and many others repeat return figures nobody can trace. Wealth tells you how long someone could let compounding work on a large starting capital. It tells you nothing about how well they grew capital. And a famous infographic with returns of more than 100 percent a year has been copied from site to site for years without a primary source. For this ranking we used only figures that a fund report, a shareholder letter, a contest organizer or a major newspaper actually published.

I have traded since 1980 and watched the era most of these names come from as it happened. So this article does not only say who reached which return. It also says what became of these traders afterwards. For some of them, that is the real lesson. I also know some of the traders from the World Cup Trading Championship personally, and they get their own section below. This article follows our editorial policy.

The best traders in the world in 30 seconds

• Jim Simons leads the documented ranking with the Medallion Fund: about 38% a year after fees and about 63% before fees, compounded from 1988 to 2018.
• Stanley Druckenmiller has the cleanest record of a single manager: about 30% a year from 1986 to 2010 at Duquesne Capital, without one losing year.
• Peter Lynch, Bruce Kovner and Warren Buffett follow with 29.2%, about 21% and 19.7% a year over 13, 28 and 61 years.
• The highest single year comes from a contest: Larry Williams turned $10,000 into more than $1.1 million in 1987, an official return of 11,376%. He never repeated it.
• The famous “120% a year” figures for Richard Dennis and others have no primary source. What is documented for Dennis is a newspaper estimate and the results of his Turtle traders.
• Reality for private traders looks very different. A Brazilian study found that 97% of day traders who kept going for more than 300 days lost money.

What is trading performance?

The term is used loosely on the internet. Sometimes it means the profit of a single trade, sometimes the total assets of a fund manager, sometimes the return of one year. None of these works for a comparison.

Trading performance is the average annual return a trader reaches over several years, measured against the capital used and the drawdown suffered along the way.

The key words are “over several years”. One strong year proves nothing. It can be skill, it can be luck, and it can simply be a market that suited the style. Only when a trader repeats a similar return over ten, fifteen or twenty years does the number become reliable.

The second measure that belongs to it is the drawdown. It is the temporary fall in capital between two highs of your account.

The maximum drawdown is the largest percentage fall from an account high to the following low.

Two traders with 40% a year are not equally good if one of them lost 15% on the way and the other 60%. Most traders underestimate how much a drawdown affects their decisions. If you are down 60%, you need a gain of 150% just to get back to zero. The third measure is whether the number itself is comparable.

The compound annual return is the geometric average return per year over a period, and the only measure that handles compounding and losing years correctly.

A simple average of “plus 100%, minus 50%” gives 25% a year. In reality you are exactly back at zero after those two years. Where a source gives a simple average instead of a compound figure, the table says so.

The ranking: best traders in the world by documented annual return

The table shows long-term annual returns that have a traceable source. The longer the period, the more meaningful the number. Fund figures are net of fees unless the table says otherwise.

Trader (fund)	Return per year	Period
Jim Simons (Medallion Fund)	about 38% compound after fees, 63% before	1988 to 2018
Stanley Druckenmiller (Duquesne)	about 30% average, no losing year	1986 to 2010
Peter Lynch (Fidelity Magellan)	29.2% annualized	1977 to 1990
Bruce Kovner (Caxton)	about 21% after fees	1983 to 2011
Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway)	19.7% compound	1965 to 2025
Paul Tudor Jones (Tudor BVI Global)	about 18% average	1986 to mid-2016
Bill Ackman (Pershing Square, combined record)	16.2% compound	2004 to 2025

Sources: Simons, our calculation from the yearly returns in Bradford Cornell’s 2020 study of the Medallion Fund (the study’s simple averages are 66% before and 39% after fees); Druckenmiller, Reuters, 2010; Lynch, CNN Money, 2003; Kovner, his official biography; Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letter 2025 (market value per share); Tudor Jones, Fortune and Bloomberg, August 2016; Ackman, Pershing Square annual report 2025 (the earlier Pershing Square fund and Pershing Square Holdings combined). “Compound” means the geometric average; “average” means the source does not say how it was calculated.

For comparison: the S&P 500 returned about 10.5% a year from 1965 to 2025. That figure includes dividends and comes from the same Berkshire letter.

Two famous names are missing from this table on purpose. Richard Dennis and Michael Marcus are among the most impressive traders of their era, but there is no published, continuous annual return for either of them. Their sections below show what is documented instead. George Soros is often credited with about 30% a year at the Quantum Fund; when he returned outside money in 2011, the New York Times put the average at about 20% a year over four decades. With no published fund record, he stays out of the table too.

The famous infographic: why we do not use it

If you search for the best traders in the world, you will soon find a table that ranks Richard Dennis first with 120% a year over 19 years. It continues with Michael Marcus at 120% over 10 years, Jaffray Woodriff at 118% over 10 years, Bruce Kovner at 87% and Randy McKay at about 80%. Our own German article used it too.

We checked these figures and found no primary source for the top three values. They are passed from site to site. Only Kovner’s figure can be traced: Jack Schwager’s Market Wizards (1989) reports an 87% compounded return for Kovner over the previous ten years, which also shows how much higher returns are on smaller capital.

That does not make these traders less impressive. It just means a ranking built on their numbers ranks legends, not records. Treat any list with three-digit returns over decades as a story until you see where the numbers come from.

Why net worth is the wrong yardstick

If you search for “best trader in the world”, you get almost the same list everywhere. Warren Buffett, George Soros, Paul Tudor Jones, Peter Lynch. It is sorted by net worth. That is convenient, because the number is public. For the question of who trades best, it is not enough.

Do the math once. Warren Buffett reached about 19.7% a year over 61 years. That is a superb achievement, because he did it with tens of billions of dollars and almost twice the return of the S&P 500. But Druckenmiller and Lynch reached higher annual returns. Buffett’s fortune is the result of return times time times capital, and few people had the last two factors as favorable as he did.

There is a second reason, and it matters more. Above a certain fund size you cannot reach certain returns any more. Whoever moves $100 billion cannot get in and out of small markets without moving the price. That is exactly why Jim Simons closed his best fund to outside investors. And it is good rather than bad news for you as a private trader that the highest returns come from traders with smaller capital.

Jim Simons: the best documented performance in history

The mathematician Jim Simons founded Renaissance Technologies and ran the Medallion Fund there from 1988. Simons died on May 10, 2024, aged 86.

The figures have no equal. According to a 2020 study by the finance professor Bradford Cornell, Medallion returned an average of about 66% a year before fees from 1988 to 2018, or about 63% compounded. After its unusually high fees, investors kept an average of about 39% a year; compounded from the study’s yearly figures, that is about 38% a year. Over 31 years. The fees were 5% of assets plus a share of profits that rose from 20% to 44% by 2002. The fund never had a losing year before fees; the only year with a loss after fees was 1989.

So why is this not available to anyone? Because return and capacity clash. Medallion stopped taking new outside money in 1993, and the remaining outside investors had to leave by the mid-2000s. Today it manages mostly the money of its own employees and deliberately stays small. The public Renaissance funds come nowhere near these values.

For you as a trader, the lesson is uncomfortable. The best documented track record in the world rests on a team of PhDs in mathematics and physics, its own data infrastructure and a fund you cannot invest in.

Stanley Druckenmiller: 25 years without a losing year

With Druckenmiller, the record is not only the size of the return but its consistency. From 1986 to 2010 his firm Duquesne Capital returned about 30% a year without a single losing year. When he announced in August 2010 that he would return outside money, he managed about $12 billion.

His most famous trade shows why position size decides more than the hit rate. In 1992 he was running George Soros’s Quantum Fund and built the bet against the British pound. Soros pushed him to make it much larger. The profit was more than $1 billion.

The downside is just as well documented. In 2000, the Quantum Fund lost about $3 billion with technology stocks, although Druckenmiller had recognized the bubble. Being right about the bubble and wrong about the timing cost more than most traders ever manage.

Bruce Kovner: about 21% a year after fees over 28 years

Bruce Kovner started by borrowing $3,000 on his credit card and betting on soybean futures. The trade rose to about $40,000 at one point, then ran back. He closed it with about $23,000 profit. Almost eight times his stake, and still he took one lesson from it above all: he had no plan for the exit.

Kovner founded his own fund, Caxton Associates, in 1983. Caxton became one of the largest global macro funds in the world, at its peak with more than $14 billion under management.

A global macro approach bets on economic developments across all asset classes rather than on individual securities.

Kovner watched political, economic and social developments. He took positions in stocks, bonds, currencies and commodities, mostly based on fundamentals, with charts for timing. In his case, a human made the final decision, the direct opposite of Simons’ models.

From 1983 until his retirement in 2011, Caxton returned about 21% a year after fees. Kovner retired in September 2011. His approach still shapes institutional currency trading today.

Richard Dennis: from $400 to an estimated $200 million, and two collapses

Richard Dennis borrowed $1,600 from his family in the early 1970s. He spent $1,200 on a seat at the MidAmerica Commodity Exchange and traded with the $400 that was left. In 1989, the Wall Street Journal wrote that he had turned this into an estimated $200 million or so in 18 years. If that estimate is right, his capital roughly doubled every year. But it is a newspaper estimate, not an audited record, and that is why Dennis is not in the table above.

He became famous for something else: he was convinced that trading can be taught like any craft. His partner William Eckhardt disagreed and said good traders are born. In 1983 the two turned the argument into an experiment.

The Turtle traders were beginners whom Richard Dennis and William Eckhardt trained in a rule-based trend-following system from December 1983 onwards. About 1,000 people answered each newspaper ad. Dennis chose 13 for the first class and 10 for a second class a year later.

Most participants had little or no trading experience. They got a fixed set of rules for futures trading, two weeks of training and then real money. According to the Wall Street Journal of September 5, 1989, the 14 Turtles it tracked earned an average compound return of 80% a year over four and a half years. The best of them, Stig Ostgaard, averaged 124.1% a year from 1985 to 1988. That answered the question: trading can be learned if the rules and the capital are right.

The system was strictly rule-based, on entry and exit. They bought on a breakout above the 20-day or 55-day high and exited on the opposite 10-day or 20-day breakout. The initial stop was 2N, two times the average daily range, which the Turtles called N.

If you copy it today, you will be disappointed. Trend following still works, but exactly these parameters have been public since 2003. That removes the edge. The complete rules are in our guide to Turtle trading, and Michael Covel tells the full story in his book The Complete TurtleTrader.

Now the part most rankings leave out. In the 1987 crash, Dennis reportedly lost about $10 million, and about $50 million over 1987 and 1988. In the spring of 1988 he stopped managing money for others after his clients suffered heavy losses, and in 1990 his firm settled investor complaints for more than $2.5 million without admitting wrongdoing. He came back in 1994 with the Dennis Trading Group and closed it in the summer of 2000 after new losses. The man who proved that trading can be taught had to stop twice. That is not a footnote, it is the main message.

Michael Marcus: from $30,000 to $80 million

Michael Marcus turned a $30,000 trading account at Commodities Corporation into $80 million in about ten years, according to his interview in Market Wizards. He credits his success mainly to his mentor Ed Seykota, one of the pioneers of systematic trend following.

The number is less simple than it looks. The firm added $100,000 along the way and took money out every year to pay for its expenses, so it is not a clean annual return. Bruce Kovner, a colleague and close friend, said in the same book that Marcus showed him a million dollars could be made.

Randy McKay: from floor runner to a million-dollar pound trade

Randy McKay came back from Vietnam as a Marine and actually wanted to become a psychologist. His brother, a broker at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, got him a job as a runner on the trading floor. Exchange in the morning, university in the afternoon. A job, nothing more.

In 1972 the CME opened the International Monetary Market for currency futures. Demand was so weak that seats sold for only $10,000. His brother got him a seat and lent him $5,000. McKay kept $3,000 to live on and traded the other $2,000. Within about seven months it had grown to about $70,000.

His first million came from a single trade in the British pound. The British government wanted to cap the pound at $1.72. McKay bet on the breakout upwards, and when it came, the trade made $1.3 million.

His approach is the most transferable in this article for private traders. McKay traded medium-term trends with a mix of price action and fundamentals, preferably through breakouts. The key part was his risk control: in good phases he raised his risk per trade, in bad phases he lowered it. That is exactly the opposite of what most traders do.

Jaffray Woodriff: when a famous number meets a fund report

Jaffray Woodriff is co-founder and CEO of Quantitative Investment Management (QIM) in Charlottesville, Virginia. His name appears in the famous infographic with 118% a year. His documented fund history tells a different and more useful story.

A quantitative approach makes buy and sell decisions only through statistically tested models, without discretionary intervention.

QIM uses machine learning to forecast short-term price moves in futures markets. The firm grew from about $500 million to about $5 billion in assets by 2009. After a long weak phase, and a loss of about 46% in one of its funds in the first nine months of 2018, it managed roughly $1 billion later. A great decade does not protect against the next one. This caveat applies to every historical ranking.

Trading championships: the best public proof of performance

The best publicly verifiable source of trading performance is a real-money contest. The best known is the World Cup Trading Championship, started in 1983 by Robbins Trading. Participants trade for a full year with real money in real accounts, and the brokers confirm the results.

Larry Williams has held the record since 1987 with 11,376% in one year. $10,000 became more than $1.1 million. That is why his name is at the top of many lists. It is not in our ranking for a simple reason: he never reached that size again. A one-off year is worthless as proof of long-term performance, however spectacular the number looks.

The more meaningful name is Andrea Unger. The Italian won the annual contest in 2008, 2009 and 2010 and a quarterly contest in 2012, all in futures. Several titles under supervision, in different market phases, are worth more as proof of a repeatable edge than a single outlier.

Championship traders I know

Some of the best documented results in the World Cup Trading Championship come from German traders, and I know some of them. That matters to me, because a contest result is one of the few performance figures nobody can polish afterwards.

Maxim Schulz is one of them, and I know him personally. He finished third in the 2017 futures contest with 111.7% and published his trades openly at the time. Today he teaches the COT approach he learned from Larry Williams.

The team of Suricate Trading is another. I have followed them for years and know the people behind it. Their company account won the 2024/25 Global Cup futures contest with 183.3% and is third in the 2026 annual futures contest.

The current name to watch is Patrick Nill. He won the Global Cup forex contest twice, in 2021/22 and 2022/23, and leads the 2026 annual forex contest with 303.1% (as of October 7, 2026). He is behind the training program Trade The Traders, which we tested on our German site.

My own rule after more than 45 years in the market is simple. I only believe a number when I see the account statement, an audit or a supervised contest result behind it. Everything else is marketing.

Realistic returns: what private traders actually make

This question belongs in every article about top performance, or the picture becomes completely distorted. The names above are the absolute outliers of several decades and millions of market participants.

The most reliable study comes from Brazil. Three economists analyzed all individuals who started day trading mini index futures in Brazil between 2013 and 2015. In the 2019 version of their paper, 97% of those who kept going for more than 300 trading days lost money. Only 1.1% earned more than the Brazilian minimum wage. And the authors found no learning effect over time (working paper “Day Trading for a Living?”).

For Europe, the securities regulator ESMA supplies the comparison. In its 2018 analysis of CFD trading, 74% to 89% of retail accounts lost money, depending on the country, with average losses of €1,600 to €29,000 per client. This is the basis for the risk warning you see at every CFD broker in Europe.

So what is a realistic target? In my experience, traders who are consistently profitable usually make a low to mid double-digit return per year, with a drawdown that still lets them sleep at night. That sounds thin next to the legends. Yet $10,000 at 17% a year becomes about $231,000 after 20 years. Anyone who sells you triple-digit returns as normal is selling you an outlier as the expected value.

How to measure your own trading performance

Most traders look at their account balance and nothing else. With that you cannot judge whether your trading works. Five measures are enough, and all you need is a clean trading journal.

• Compound annual return: not the profit in dollars, but the geometric yearly average over at least three years. Anything shorter is noise.
• Maximum drawdown: the largest fall from a high. It decides whether you can stick with a strategy. A return you cannot bear psychologically is not a return.
• Profit factor: all gains divided by all losses. Below 1.0 you lose money, from about 1.5 it becomes sustainable.
• Expected value per trade: win rate and average reward-to-risk combined. A win rate of 40% can be very profitable, one of 70% ruinous.
• Number of trades: without enough trades, every number above is statistically meaningless.

The profit factor is the sum of all gains divided by the sum of all losses; values above 1.0 mean a profitable system.

The expected value is the average profit or loss per trade over a large number of trades.

How much these numbers swing in small samples, I calculated with 61 real trades from my own trading. The result is sobering for many: even a working system produces results over 60 trades that look random.

What the best traders in the world have in common

The traders in this article work in completely different ways. Simons fully automated, Druckenmiller and Kovner with discretion on the big economic picture, Dennis systematically, McKay through breakouts. So there is no single best approach. Four things show up with all of them anyway.

• Fixed rules instead of gut feeling: each of them knew before the entry when they would get out. Kovner learned exactly that from his first trade.
• Risk controlled consistently: they did not optimize the win rate but the size of the loss. How that works in practice is in our guides to risk management and position sizing.
• Size increased in good phases: McKay described this most clearly. More risk after winning streaks, less after losing streaks.
• In the market for decades: the figures in the table come from periods of 13 to 61 years. Whoever stops after two bad years appears in no ranking.

There is a fifth thing in common that is mentioned less often: they were in the right market at the right time. Dennis profited from the commodity trends of the 1970s, Kovner and Druckenmiller from the currency upheavals of the 1980s and 1990s, Simons from decades in which few others used his kind of models. Skill is the requirement. Timing in the market cycle is the amplifier.

Conclusion: documented returns beat legends, and time beats both

To answer the question of the best trader in the world honestly, you need three things: the annual return, the number of years behind it and a source. By this measure, Jim Simons leads with about 38% a year after fees, compounded over 31 years, followed by Stanley Druckenmiller with about 30% over 25 years without a losing year.

The second finding matters more to me. Several of the most famous names later failed or shrank sharply. Dennis stopped trading twice, and Druckenmiller lost billions by being early on a bubble he had correctly identified. A great return in the past is no protection against the next decade. If you take only the percentages from these biographies, you have skipped the most expensive part.

What is left for your own trading is little glamour and a lot of craft. A set of rules you follow, risk control that keeps you in the game, and enough patience to judge your numbers over years instead of weeks. In more than 45 years I have not met a single trader who was successful over the long run and did it differently.

Frequently asked questions about the best traders in the world

Who is the best trader in the world?

Measured by documented annual return over a long period, it is Jim Simons with the Medallion Fund. It returned about 38% a year after fees, compounded, from 1988 to 2018. The best record of a single discretionary manager belongs to Stanley Druckenmiller with about 30% a year from 1986 to 2010 without a losing year. By net worth, Warren Buffett leads, with about 19.7% a year.

Who is the most successful trader of all time?

The highest single-year result comes from Larry Williams. He won the 1987 World Cup Championship of Futures Trading with 11,376% and turned $10,000 into more than $1.1 million. As proof of lasting success it says little, because he never repeated that size. Repeated success under supervision is better shown by Andrea Unger, with three annual titles in a row from 2008 to 2010.

Who is the best day trader in the world?

There is no reliable answer, because day traders almost never publish audited results. The closest thing to proof are supervised real-money contests such as the World Cup Trading Championship. Lists of “famous day traders” online usually measure fame, not performance.

Did Richard Dennis really make 120% a year?

We found no primary source for that figure. It comes from a widely shared infographic. Documented are a 1989 Wall Street Journal estimate that he turned $400 into about $200 million in 18 years, and the 80% a year his Turtle traders earned over four and a half years.

What return is realistic in trading?

Consistently profitable traders usually make a low to mid double-digit return per year. A Brazilian study found that 97% of day traders who kept going for more than 300 days lost money. For European CFD accounts, ESMA found that 74% to 89% of private clients lose money.

Do 90% of day traders really fail?

The reliable figures are even higher than 90%. In the Brazilian study, 97% of day traders with more than 300 trading days lost money, and only 0.5% earned more than a bank teller’s starting salary. So the often quoted 90% is rather the lower estimate.

How do you measure trading performance correctly?

Use the compound annual return together with the maximum drawdown, the profit factor and the expected value per trade. A single winning year or a high account balance says nothing. The number only becomes meaningful over several years and a large enough number of trades.

Can trading be learned?

Yes, and the best evidence is Richard Dennis’s Turtle experiment from 1983. He trained beginners with little or no experience in a fixed set of rules, and the group he tracked earned about 80% a year over four and a half years. The statistics also show, though, that the large majority of private traders fail at it.