Brent Carlile won the 2024 World Cup Championship of Futures Trading with a 532.30% net return on the year, the highest result posted in the futures division since the early-2010s peak of the Andrea Unger era. He runs Carlile Trading, a discretionary global macro shop based in Jackson, Wyoming, and is a Colorado State University graduate. His specialty — and what produced the winning year — is the fed funds futures complex. Carlile trades around mispricings between consensus rate-cut or rate-hike paths and the Federal Reserve's actual reaction function. The same approach delivered outsized profits during the 2008 TARP rollout and the March 2020 COVID rate-cut sequence, both of which he has discussed publicly. In a February 2025 interview with Benzinga, he described 2024 as "a year where the curve kept telling one story and the dot plot kept telling another. You don't need to be right about which one wins. You just have to be patient enough to be there when they reconcile." Position-sizing is what distinguishes the Carlile approach from most discretionary macro books. He runs concentrated, time-bounded bets around scheduled FOMC events with explicit invalidation prices, then steps to the sidelines between meetings. The 2024 P&L was generated from a small number of high-conviction trades around five FOMC decisions, not from trying to fade every move in between. Carlile is unusual among modern WCTC winners in being a discretionary trader rather than a systematic one — the championship has been dominated since the early 2000s by algorithmic competitors. He attributes that to a deliberate choice: macro mispricings around scheduled central-bank events are, in his framing, "a structural inefficiency that doesn't backtest well because the regime is always different." The systematic approach can capture momentum or carry; it does not naturally express the kind of asymmetric, event-driven view that the fed funds curve rewards in regime-shift years like 2024.
