Mike Lundgren

Mike Lundgren won the World Cup Championship of Futures Trading three times in four years: 1989 with a 176.5% return, 1990 with 244.3%, and 1992 with 212.6%. Until Andrea Unger's run in 2008-2010, no one had matched three futures titles. And Lundgren did it with an edge no screen could give: he was a cattle feeder from Washington State who traded the livestock market he lived in every day. "I had heard about the World Cup on television and in Futures magazine," he recalled, "and I thought: hey, I think I can do pretty well myself. At that time I believe no one had better information about the cattle market than I did."

Lundgren's conviction was that fundamentals eventually win out over mechanical systems and technical analysis, and his three titles were the proof. He competed in the pre-internet championship: orders by phone, standings in a magazine, no algorithms on the leaderboard. Around the time of his third title he was also President of the Washington State Cattle Feeders Association, sat on the Board of Directors of the National Cattlemen's Association, and was named Washington State Cattle Feeder of the Year.

Competition runs through everything he does. From 1992 to 1995 he was the youngest majority owner of a Continental Basketball Association team, and since January 1991 he has been President and General Manager of Canyon Lakes Golf Course in Kennewick, Washington, one of the state's top public courses, becoming its majority owner in 1996. That means he won his third world title while simultaneously running a golf course and leading the state's cattle feeders association. A Summa Cum Laude accounting graduate of Washington State University, Lundgren returned to trading live cattle futures in the mid-2000s after a five-year hiatus, still guided by the same principle: know your market better than anyone else in it.