This blog post was the most succinct explanation of why this competition was detrimental to new traders and why this competition doesn't prove anything.
Vlad puts it eloquently:
"You cant assess trading skill by measuring the highest return over a three month period. Thats a filter for leverage and luck, not talent. Someone using a martingale strategy for instance, where its just a matter of time till the account is ruined, might get lucky and win this competition."
Here is the leader board (which was difficult to find and not published by AxiTrader that I can tell) which shows the top 12 traders and their peak drawdown. Very disturbing!
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In my opinion, a more ethical way of running a competition was not to base it solely on biggest % gain but to take into account other metrics such as drawdown, sharpe ratio and profit factor.