Up 960% in November, Third by December: What the Championship Leaderboard Hides

Almost everything written about the U.S. Investing Championship works from the year-end press release. That release is a photograph taken on 31 December. It tells you where everyone finished and nothing at all about how they got there.

The organiser also publishes a standing for every month of every year, and those boards are still online. We went through the full monthly archive from 2023 to the current 2026 competition and tracked what happened to the leaders between the months. What comes out of it is not in any of the coverage.

The leaders give back enormous ground

The final number is routinely well below the same trader’s own peak, and the givebacks are not small.

Sit with Mikulka’s year for a second. At the end of November he held the biggest number in the entire competition and was within touching distance of the all-time stock record. Four weeks later he was third. Read the final table and you see a strong year. Read the monthly boards and you see a trader who had it and could not hold it.

The biggest interim numbers often never reach December

Because monthly listing is optional, a trader who stops reporting simply disappears from the boards. The archive is full of them, and they are disproportionately the ones who had been leading.

• James Hatzigiannis led the 2024 $20,000+ Stock Division at six months on +584.9%. He does not appear on any subsequent 2024 board, including the final.
• Y. Chiu led the same division in 2025 at seven months on +779.9%, was at +635.1% a month later, and is absent from the nine, ten, eleven-month and final standings.
• Dr Terry Potter posted +1,678.8% at three months of 2026, which the organiser flagged as a three-month record for any division. Absent from the April, May, June and July boards.
• Tin Chun Jimmy Li led the 2026 stock division from January through May, peaking at +431.5%. Absent from the June and July boards.

Be careful with what that proves. Reporting is voluntary. An absence is not evidence of a loss, and a trader is entitled to go quiet and reappear only in the finals. But the pattern is consistent enough to be useful: a spectacular six-month print in this competition has a poor record of surviving to year-end.

And the winner is often invisible until the last board

The reverse happens too, which is why the finals are the only standings worth taking seriously.

In 2022, the ten-month board for the small-account stock division was led by Gemy Zhou at +406.7%, with Sean Ryan second at +153%. Afzal Lokhandwala, who won that division, is not on that board at all. He appeared at year-end with +447%.

In 2024, Judy Lai sat fourth at eleven months on +384.7%. She finished first on +449.1%, having passed three traders including the one on +960.4%.

And in 2023, Goverdhan Gajjala shows up on the four-month board at +90.7% and the five-month board at +180.4%, then vanishes from the six, seven and eight-month standings before returning at nine months on +266.5% and finishing on +805.1%. That gap lines up exactly with the period Business Insider later documented after reviewing his statements: seventeen consecutive losing trades and a month that closed down 44.4%.

What this does to the story we tell about winners

The championship’s own coverage, and almost all the coverage that follows it, presents these years as demonstrations of method. Trader wins with 805%, here is the setup they used.

The monthly archive says something less tidy and more useful. A championship year is not a smooth compounding curve. It contains at least one stretch that would have ended most people’s participation, and frequently ends well below its own high-water mark.

That is a Money and Mind story before it is a Method one:

Money. The concentration and leverage that produce a +960% eleven-month standing are the same concentration and leverage that take 550 points off it in December. You do not get one without the other. Anyone reading these boards and thinking about sizing up should look at the drawdown side of the same trade.

Mind. Gajjala’s June is the most instructive month in the modern archive. Seventeen losers in a row, down 44.4%, off the public board entirely – and then a reset that produced the second-largest annual return in the contest’s history to that point. The psychological event to plan for is not the win. It is the June.

How to use this when you read any leaderboard

Treat interim numbers as noise until they are finals. Six-month standings in this contest are close to uninformative about where the year ends.

Ask for the path. Any performance claim without a drawdown attached is half a claim. When you look at your own results, record the peak as well as the close.

Watch what happens after a big run. The traders who gave the most back were the ones who had the most to give. That is not bad luck, it is the arithmetic of an aggressive book meeting a bad month.

Prefer strings to spikes. A trader who is positive across several years in different market regimes is telling you more than a trader who was up 900% once.

The honest counterweight

None of this diminishes what the winners did. Finishing a calendar year up 969.8% on a real, verified, statement-checked account is extraordinary regardless of what the November print said. Martin Luk still won. Mikulka’s 409.6% is a superb year by any normal standard.

And there is one genuine limitation in this research. We can see published standings, not account equity. A trader who drops off the boards may have had a bad run, or may simply have stopped emailing statements. We have flagged that everywhere it applies rather than reading collapse into every gap.

What the archive does support, plainly, is that the leaderboard is a far rougher ride than the annual table admits.

Frequently asked questions

Do U.S. Investing Championship winners have big drawdowns?
Frequently. Martin Luk was up 1,358.2% at eleven months of 2025 and finished at 969.8%. Bob Doviak peaked at 1,174.5% and finished at 857.3%. Goverdhan Gajjala had a documented month down 44.4% on the way to winning his division with 805.1%.

Why do traders disappear from the monthly standings?
Monthly listing is optional under the rules. A competitor can stay off the monthly boards and appear only in the quarterly or final standings, so an absence may reflect a decision to stop reporting rather than a loss.

Is the mid-year leader usually the winner?
No. In 2022 the ten-month leader of the small-account stock division finished second, and the eventual winner was not on that board at all. In 2024 the winner was fourth at eleven months.

Where does this data come from?
The organiser’s own previous-standings archive, which publishes a board for every month of every modern year. We read them in sequence rather than only at year-end.

What should I take from it as a retail trader?
That a headline return is a snapshot, not a path, and that the size of the giveback is proportional to the aggression that produced the run. Judge yourself on the shape of the year, not the last number in it.

Continue reading

• The U.S. Investing Championship: complete results, winners and records – the full research hub, with the Path Tracker tool showing every case in this article month by month.
• Only 8% of championship traders made money – what the organiser’s own failure rate says about the leaderboard.
• The Three Pillars – the Mind, Method and Money lens we use to read every record.