Tim Rea

Rea has the unusual distinction of being the only WCTC winner based in New Zealand, and the wide-portfolio architecture (100 strategies x 25 futures contracts) makes him one of the most diversified systematic traders the championship has produced. His 2008 CME E-mini Q3 win at 83.9% put him on the leaderboard; the 2010 main-championship 3rd place at 156.6% and the 2011 main-championship 1st place at 104.1% confirmed the methodology held up across regimes. His approach is closer to a managed-futures CTA portfolio than to the single-strategy systems most WCTC competitors run: 500+ futures round-trips per month across metals, energies, agriculture and financial products, with the NZ time zone giving him a structural edge, since the U.S. trading day ends around the NZ morning and his book is monitored across more market hours than most competitors'. He attended a master class in New York with Andrea Unger, Michael Cook and Kevin Davey on systems development, the modern WCTC champions' equivalent of a peer group.

The championship years sit inside a much longer arc. Rea started in opto-electronics with a materials science degree from Sheffield, moved into corporate tech strategy and venture capital with SoftBank Ventures and NEC, and took an MBA at London Business School. From 2004 to 2018 he ran a flexible portfolio of advisory work and a primary role with ePlanet Ventures, which is precisely the window in which he built his automated trading operation from New Zealand and won the title. In 2018 he came full circle: he joined BGF in London, a 2.5bn pound fund known as the UK's most active investor, and now sits on the boards of