트레이딩 대회 참가를 통해 본 현실 투자의 세계

Whether it's your main gig or a side hustle, big money or small potatoes, domestic or foreign stocks (Donghak or Seohak movements), anyone with a bit of investment experience probably wants to objectively check their skills. I was one of them. It felt like getting a level test at a high-end cram school in Daechi-dong, lol. I found an available trading competition, so I decided to take the challenge with a small amount ($300, about 500k KRW). It was hosted by an overseas broker, but I won't name them to avoid advertising. Here are the competition details:

-Eligibility: New and existing clients aged 18+ -Competition Period: October 15, 2025 ~ December 15, 2025 -Entry Requirement: Open a challenge account (min $100 deposit) → Withdrawals possible after the competition ends -Ranking Criteria: Investment Return (ROI)% (updated hourly) -Total Prize Pool: $30,000 ($12k for 1st, $8k for 2nd, $5k for 3rd, $1k for 4th-6th, $500 for 7th-10th) -Tradable Products: Forex, Index CFDs, Commodity CFDs, Crypto CFDs, Stock CFDs (international), etc. — all products offered by the broker.

I heard about the competition late, so I rushed to start on December 1st. When I logged in, I saw that the top 10 rankings were already pretty much locked in, which definitely took the wind out of my sails. Since the prize money wasn't my main goal anyway, I decided to focus on the experience itself. (I only traded Forex, which is also a CFD. I don't have the fancy hand skills for scalping, so I stick to swing trend trading, and I only treat it as a hobby for about an hour a day.)

In the first week, I got hit with several small stop losses and my account slightly melted, but thanks to the expected direction change following the US Fed rate cut announcement last week, I eventually closed with a profit (익절). There was one more day until the competition ended, but dragging the position would only increase rollover fees, and since I didn't know what variables might pop up over the weekend, I just settled everything. My final ROI score was 35.27%. Since I started late and my seed money was pathetic, it's nothing to brag about publicly; it's just enough to add a large sweet and sour pork (Tangsuyuk) to the family dinner.

Now, this is what I really want to talk about.

As you can see in the table below, the returns posted by the top 10 finishers are absolutely on another level. In particular, the trader who took first place had an ROI of a whopping 11,078%—meaning they earned 110 times their investment capital in just two months. People who only trade stocks might wonder if this is even possible, but among pros who use massive leverage in derivatives and employ aggressive scalping techniques, such insane numbers occasionally appear, though rarely. Many novice investors are easily dazzled by these flashy figures.

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What's clear is that traders who make it into the top 10 (the prize winners) are truly exceptions among exceptions, and anyone maintaining this kind of return consistently is an extreme outlier on the normal distribution curve. If you move further down the rankings, into the top 100, the performance figures become relatively more realistic.

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My 35% ROI might seem like nothing, but that performance secured me 84th place overall, putting me in the top 1.4% of all participants (5,991 people). Only 168 people finished the competition with even $1 in profit. Being 168th means you're still in the top 2.8%.

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Put differently, the overwhelming majority of participants—97%—either made no profit whatsoever or took a loss. Countless people must have been margin-called, too. This is the cold, hard reality. Just like the photos uploaded on Insta don't reflect the true real world, aren't there many people who harbor illusions about investing after seeing those occasional "profit verification" posts uploaded on community forums?

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In the derivatives trading industry, the ‘90-90-90 rule’ is famous: 90% of traders lose 90% of their assets within 90 days. I know from multiple personal margin call experiences that this is absolutely not an exaggeration, and this competition participation confirmed it even more clearly. It’s not that this competition was especially tough. This was the first time I saw the ranking data from 1st place to dead last, and honestly, I learned a lot from it. No matter what product you invest in, if you earned a return higher than the bank interest rate, you should feel proud of yourself, and that’s plenty to be thankful for. The zero-sum game world is ruthless. There is absolutely no guarantee that today’s returns will continue tomorrow or the day after. Considering that Warren Buffett, arguably the most successful investor in history, has an "annual" average return of about 20%, I want to tell you that simply protecting your valuable assets this year is already a success. I hope everyone has a warm finish to the rest of the year.