MinKyeom Kim
🇰🇷South Korea· Ulsan
The first Korean to win the IQC — a 25-year-old industrial-engineering undergrad who beat 80,000 contestants from his dorm room in Ulsan.
Out of 80,000 contestants from 11,000 universities, MinKyeom Kim — a 25-year-old industrial-engineering undergrad at UNIST in Ulsan — was the one who walked out of the Marina Bay finals with first place. Korea had never won the WorldQuant International Quant Championship before. His prize: $23,000 and a 2026 internship at WorldQuant's headquarters in Old Greenwich, Connecticut. He is double-majoring in Industrial Engineering and Business Administration, and submitted alphas — predictive mathematical signals — through the firm's BRAIN platform across a three-stage funnel that whittled the original field down to the top 0.02%.
The IQC is not a discretionary trading event. Contestants design alpha formulas that score on out-of-sample financial-data backtests, then defend their research to a panel of WorldQuant's senior management at the live final in Singapore. The 2025 edition was the first run as individual competition rather than team. Kim's win was carried in the WorldQuant press release and a UNIST university feature; WorldQuant's own social channels published a "Meet MinKyeom Kim" video shortly after the finals.
Beyond the championship, Kim's public footprint is small — a fresh LinkedIn profile titled "Global Champion - International Quant Championship 2025," a UNIST press feature, and the WQ video. He's not a public-content trader and has no Twitter / TradingView presence. His next chapter is the 2026 WorldQuant internship in the U.S.