The Legacy of Richard Dennis and the Turtle Traders

Can a trader be fully taught or must he have certain skills that are prerequisites for success? This is a very common question and it was based on that question that Richard Dennis and his partner William Eckhardt (we will talk about him in an upcoming post) created in the 1980s the Turtle Traders project, name that came after visiting Singapore and passing a breeding site. of rare turtles.

In creating the Turtle Traders project, Richard Dennis was already a commodity tycoon and a very successful trader, but it was not always so.

In the summer of 1970 Richard Dennis was a floor trader on the Chicago commodity exchange and decided at that moment that he would become a trader, borrowing $ 1,600 to buy a trading seat, which costs $ 1,200 leaving him with $ 400 to start trading. operations, not by chance, turned that $ 400 into about $ 200,000,000 over a period of twenty years.

Over the years he developed his technique based on trend patterns and achieved excellent results, as described above, but some years ago his result was very bad, for example, in the crash of 1987, he lost more than half of his assets. As a result of his personal wealth, large losses occurred a few more times during his career, including just before retiring, and most of the time these large losses caused the lack of market focus, leading to lack of discipline. , for whatever reason, in more recent cases, for being more involved in politics than in the marketplace.

About the Turtle Traders project, twenty-four ordinary citizens were selected by him and Eckhardt through interviews in which they sought people who had a reasonable sense of risk and returns but no specific market knowledge. Once selected, the students underwent two weeks of training, after the training was completed, each given USD 1,000,000 to operate.

Over time, some traders in this group have come out of bad performance because they no longer like being in business and it is said that even because of political issues between trade and boss (as already mentioned, Richard Dennis has always been very involved. with politics), but some of these traders (which will be commented on in other posts in the series) have become great fund managers, who perform very well to this day and have a monstrous uptake.

Richard Dennis never hid his method of operation, not even his way of managing risk, which he did very well, at least most of the time, was to follow his developed method strictly, something that evidently brought excellent results for him.