Danillo Ramos Duarte

The final of the inaugural Copa BTG Trader was October 17, 2025, in front of roughly two thousand people in São Paulo. Danillo Ramos Duarte — 43, fifteen years on the metalwork floor at Usiminas in Cubatão — walked out with the cup: 2,247 contracts traded across the competition, primarily mini-índice (WIN), with supporting positions in mini-dólar (WDO), bitcoin and ether futures. The prize was R$1 million, paid as credit into his BTG brokerage account. Before the win he had no public following; the cup was his coming-out.

He started trading in October 2020, the part of the pandemic that gave him hours at home instead of overtime. The serious phase began in February 2022, when the Russia-Ukraine invasion blew Brazilian volatility wide open and offered the kind of moves a beginner can either ride or be liquidated by. An R$80,000 drawdown along the way taught him the discipline he came in with. His Copa method, as he described it to BTG's "Trader Talks" episode #103: macro and news first — Powell speeches, U.S. data releases — then chart structure for the entry. He kept the rotation tight, leaning on WIN as the primary instrument and using the other contracts for confirmation rather than diversification.

He is not a creator-trader. No YouTube channel of his own, no X persona, no LinkedIn positioning. He ran night shifts at the steel mill and traded the morning Bovespa hours without sleeping. The story BTG is now amplifying — operário who became milionário, the worker who became a millionaire — is the kind of proof-of-concept the Brazilian retail trading community had been waiting for: that the screen can be open to anyone who shows up.