Cary Kinkle won the 2012 World Cup Championship of Futures Trading with a 199.6% net return, ahead of William Armstrong (67%) and Allen Swiontek (56.6%). It was no ordinary season to win: the contest was hosted at the time by PFGBest, and in July 2012 the broker collapsed after founder Russell Wasendorf's fraud came to light. Kinkle traded through the most chaotic year in the championship's modern history and still finished on top.

Trading is not his day job. Kinkle has spent nearly four decades in Southern California commercial real estate: a commercial broker since 1987, four years at CBRE, then more than twenty years as a self-employed asset developer and investor in Pasadena. Since 2022 he has served on the board of directors of Duckett-Wilson Development Company, which owns and manages 63 neighborhood shopping centers across California, Nevada and Denver. He holds a B.S. in Business-Finance and a Masters in Real Estate/Finance from USC. His professional world is built on the slowest kind of investing there is, which makes his results in one of the fastest arenas in finance all the more striking.

In 2025, thirteen years after his title, Kinkle returned to the World Cup Championship of Futures Trading. He spent much of the season inside the top three of the leaderboard before finishing outside the final top five. Few champions from the past decade have come back to test themselves against a new generation. Kinkle did.