About trading competitions:
even at the "pro level", they're widely used to mislead the public about "who's likely to achieve what": for example, the NFA fined Larry Williams for not reporting to potential clients that, while his personal account in a promotional 1987 contest was very profitable (a gain of $900,000), his managed accounts for clients lost substantial funds (over $6,000,000) - that was held to constitute deceptive and unbalanced promotional material and disclosure statements. And in July 1988, the Larry Williams Financial Strategy Fund was launched, followed in March 1989 by the World Cup Championship Fund, managed by Larry Williams, Jake Bernstein and two others: the 1988 fund lost more than 50% of its clients’ equity in barely one year, and the 1989 fund also lost more than half of its original equity by May 1990. These are not obscure, isolated incidents: they’re actually fairly typical of the motivations of pro-competition performers, precisely because it's the ability to use competition results misleadingly in sales materials that often attracts "pro-players" to these horrible competitions.]
-from another thread