Petra Ilona Zacek
🇨🇿Czechia· Lake Havasu City
Floor trader at the Prague Stock Exchange — then a 257.9% Robbins year that her algorithms ran without her hands ever touching the pit.
Petra Zacek's first career was inside the pit — a floor trader based in Vienna, Frankfurt, and London in an era when equities still moved by voice, paper, eye-contact, and hand-signals. She briefly passed through Prague for 2.5 months during a company relocation between Vienna and Frankfurt, but her floor years were built in the major European trading centres. Twenty years later she's a Robbins WCTC Futures Champion, taking the 2018 title with a 2579% return on a real-money $10,000 account that closed the year at around $35,800. She's also a rare modern female champion in a field that has been almost entirely male since 1983 and one of the two highest-profile Unger Academy alumnae (alongside Stefano Serafini, 2017).
Her own framing of the transition, from the MoneyShow profile interview that became her most-cited public moment, is the one that explains the pivot: I came from the floor, but algos gave me the discipline I couldn't enforce by hand. Husband Václav "Iceman" Zacek is also a trader and announced her championship win on Facebook before Robbins did. The teaching pedigree she now sits inside — Larry Williams trained Andrea Unger, Unger founded Unger Academy in 2015, the academy produced Serafini in 2017 and Zacek in 2018 — is one of the cleanest coaching trees in competitive trading.