TL;DR - Traders who have won or placed in audited competitions do not agree on whether intuition belongs in a trade. A 2018 World Cup Trading Championship winner says she feels nothing when she trades and would make all her money in one position if she could. The 2026 WorldQuant IQC India champions say the data gets the final say and an idea is only interesting when the evidence keeps supporting it. The two camps share one thing: a rule that stops the trader from fooling himself. The quotes below are verbatim from the interviews on this site.
Ask a room of winning traders whether they trust their gut and you will not get a consensus. You will get two rooms. That is the finding from the interview series on this site, where more than fifty traders with verified competition results answered questions about how they decide. Vitalii Kaminskyi, who conducts the interviews, summarised the pattern in a LinkedIn piece on 35 of those winners: the same question, opposite answers, and no obvious correlation between the answer and the result.
This article collects the strongest statements from each side, with the placing that earns each trader the right to be quoted. Every line is taken from the interview on the trader's profile page.
The case for feeling the market
Petra Ilona Zacek won the 2018 World Cup Trading Championship at +257.9%, the only woman to take the title in more than three decades of the event. She spent her career on institutional trading floors in Vienna, Frankfurt, London and Paris before trading her own account, and she is precise about what the floor gave her:
"When I started trading on my own, I missed the energy, the market talk, the team and the people interaction and brainstorming, because when you talk to people you might come up with an idea that leads to a major trade."
That sounds like an argument for instinct. Her description of herself under pressure says something more specific:
"I am very lucky, as I do not have adrenaline spikes when I trade and I have zero trading itches; if I could, I would make all my money on one single trade."
And on the people who shout:
"When people get excited and their heart rate goes up, it impairs clear brain function; therefore most of the superstars on the trading floor never shout and are very composed."
Read together, the three lines describe a trader who values human input at the idea stage and removes it entirely at the execution stage. The feel is for finding the trade. The trade itself is cold.
Vincent Mischke, a classical chart pattern trader and TradingView Editors' Pick, is the clearest advocate of visual judgement in the series. His confidence comes from the age of the patterns, not from the moment:
"Throughout my trading experiences I found that often the classical patterns, which worked 100 years ago, are still intact today and generate strong trading signals."
"A trading range for example can be compared to a mouse caught in a box. The mouse is hitting on the boundaries of the box till it finally breaks out rapidly."
Michaël van de Poppe, founder of MN Fund, was asked whether Dutch traders have a cultural edge. His answer puts emotion on the cost side of the ledger:
"I think many Dutch people are rational and stubborn, and therefore have an edge, as suppressing your emotions is the biggest advantage in trading."
The case for letting the data decide
The quantitative side of the series is anchored by Team Smoooth Operator, four IIT Madras students who won the 2026 WorldQuant International Quant Championship India National Finals. Tisha Hirani describes the moment the approach made sense to her:
"What clicked for me was the research loop: you have a hypothesis, you turn it into something testable, you run it against data, and the data gets the final say. I liked that there was very little room for convincing yourself that an idea was good just because it sounded good."
And what the competition did to her trust in intuition:
"One thing that surprised me was how often an idea that sounded intuitively strong turned out to be weak once we actually tested it."
"It made me much more skeptical of intuition on its own. In quant, an idea isn't really interesting because it sounds clever. It's interesting when the data keeps giving you a reason to believe it."
Her teammate Prathamesh Dharmaraja names the skill he thinks is most underrated, and it is the opposite of conviction:
"I'd say it's intellectual honesty, specifically, the discipline to kill your own idea when the data tells you to. It's natural to get attached to a model you've spent hours building, and the instinct is often to look for reasons it should work rather than evidence that it doesn't."
He also describes the moment in the finals when the leaderboard and the strategy disagreed. The team ranked in the top three nationally on out-of-sample performance but sat eighth on the overall score heading into the last round:
"It pushed us to think less like competitors chasing a rank and more like researchers defending a thesis, which in hindsight was exactly the shift that helped us stand out."
Sumit Kumar, who finished second at the 2025 IQC Global Finals in Singapore as the only Indian in the top three, came to the problem with no finance background at all:
"I come from an engineering background and had no prior knowledge of finance. My approach was more mathematics driven. For building Alphas I used techniques like template generation, combinatorial approaches and LLM-driven pipelines."
Siddhesh Kamble, also of Smoooth Operator, states the rule in four words: "Everything had to be validated through data and backtesting."
The trader who sits on both chairs
Pau Perdices Bellet won the 2025 World Cup Championship of Forex Trading with a record 600.9%, trading gold with the trend. His process starts with imagination and ends with arithmetic:
"When I size a position, I always start by considering the worst-case scenario for the trade. I then size the position accordingly so that even if that scenario happens, it doesn't have a significant impact on my long-term performance. For me, protecting the account and staying in the game is more important than maximizing the return on any individual trade."
Picking the trade is discretionary. Sizing it is a formula. The record return came from the second half of that sentence, not the first.
What the split actually tells you
Three things hold across both camps, and they matter more than which camp a trader belongs to.
Every one of them has a mechanism against self-deception. For the quants it is the backtest and the out-of-sample period. For Zacek it is a flat pulse. For Perdices it is the worst-case sizing rule. Nobody in the series trusts their own enthusiasm without a check on it.
The answer correlates with the instrument, not with the result. The quant camp works in cross-sectional equity alphas, where thousands of positions are held at once and no single trade matters. The discretionary camp works in futures and forex, where one position can be the year. A gold trader and an alpha researcher are answering different questions.
Competitions force the choice into the open. A leaderboard does not care how a trader felt about a position. That is why so many of the interviewees describe the competition as the place where their method got honest: the ranking is the data, whether or not the trader likes data.
If you want to see where each of these traders placed, the Hall of Fame holds the verified records, and the World Cup Trading Championships and U.S. Investing Championship pages explain how those placings are audited.
Frequently asked questions
Do professional traders trust their gut?
Some do, some refuse to, and the interviews on this site contain winners on both sides. What they share is a check against self-deception: a backtest, a sizing rule, or a deliberately flat emotional state. Intuition without such a check appears in none of the winning accounts.
Is data-driven trading better than discretionary trading?
The interview record does not support a winner. The 2025 WCTC Forex champion (600.9%) is discretionary at entry and mechanical at sizing. The 2025 and 2026 IQC winners are fully data-driven. Both approaches produced audited results in the same two-year window.
Where do these quotes come from?
From the interview section of each trader's profile on trading-tournaments.com, conducted by Vitalii Kaminskyi. Each quote is reproduced verbatim and linked to the profile where the full interview appears.
Why do quant traders distrust intuition more than futures traders?
Because of the instrument. Cross-sectional alpha research holds thousands of small positions where no single idea matters and intuition cannot be tested trade by trade. Futures and forex traders hold a few large positions where judgement at entry is unavoidable, so they put the discipline into sizing instead.
Related
- The G.O.A.T. canon: what it means to enter the record which placings count as verified, and why.
- The P&L screenshot problem why a leaderboard is evidence and a screenshot is not.
- How to win a trading tournament the practical playbook assembled from past champions.
- WCTC vs USIC how the two championships quoted here are scored and audited.
Last reviewed 2026-10-13 by the trading-tournaments.com editorial team. Quotes are verbatim from published interviews; corrections via the Suggest a change form.