Editor’s recommendation of the Turtle Trading Rules

The Turtle Experiment

Richard Dennis wanted to find out whether great traders are born or nurtured.

A cliché: Nature or nurture?

In mid-1983, the famous commodities speculator Richard Dennis had a debate with his old friend Bill Eckhart. The debate was about whether great traders are born Creation is acquired. Richard believed that he could teach people to become great traders. Bill believed that heredity and nature were the determining factors.

To solve this problem, Richard suggested recruiting and training some traders, giving them real accounts to trade, and seeing which of the two was correct.

They placed large advertisements in Barron's, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, recruiting trading students. The ad states that after a short training session, newbies will be provided with an account to trade.

Because Rick (Richard's nickname) was perhaps the most famous trader in the world at the time, more than 1,000 applicants came to join him. He met with 80 of them.

This group of people selected 10 people, and later the list became 13 people, and the added 3 people Rick knew before. At the end of December 1983, we (Annotation: The author was one of the trainees at the time) were invited to Chicago for two weeks of training. By the beginning of January 1984, we started trading with a small account. By early February, after we had proven our abilities, Dennis offered most of us capital accounts ranging from $500,000 to $2 million.

“The students were called ‘turtles.’ (Mr. Dennis said he had just returned from Asia when the program began. He explained what he had said to others, ‘We are growing as traders, just Just like they are growing into turtles in Singapore')"----Stanley W. Angrist, "Wall Street Journal", September 5, 1989

The turtles became trading history. The most famous experiment, because in the following four years we achieved an average annual compound interest rate of 80%.

Yes, Rick proved that trading can be taught. He proved that using a simple set of rules, he could make people with little or no trading experience become great traders.