WINNER: Champion Trader ***
HANDY scalping, some recklessly large position sizes and a close eye on the news helped Jason Khan, an account manager at email marketing company Silverpop, be crowned Champion Trader. Khan managed to turn £10,000 into an astounding £350,017 between 1 November and 1 December, beating almost 2,000 other participants to the grand prize of £6,000.
Khan, who had done some live trading before, focused on the market he knew best: Wall Street. He made his profits by keeping the position sizes large – sometimes trading as much as £2,000 per point – and concentrating on just getting a few points worth of profit on any one trade.
“I took a lot of gambles because it was a competition – I would never ordinarily trade my money that way,” he said.
His best trade, at least in terms of profit, earned him approximately £136,000. The Dow had fallen to just below the psychologically significant 11,000 but then rebounded strongly.
Khan says he was trading off the back of news and used technicals and charts only to confirm trades.
His luck continued last week as he also won a poker competition.
Khan also scooped up the £1,000 prize for the greatest increase in account value in the fourth week. Dong Shi (shidong) won this prize in the first week, but it was picked up by Jesus Alonso Vargas Esparza (alonsove) in the second week and Robert Martin (Gekko1981) in the third week of the competition. Congratulations and many thanks to all who participated.