The bet that built the Turtles
Richard Dennis was one of the most successful commodity traders of his era, a man who reportedly turned a small borrowed stake into a fortune measured in the hundreds of millions on the Chicago trading floors. His friend and partner, William Eckhardt, was a mathematician who believed exceptional traders possessed something innate that couldn't be transferred.
Dennis disagreed. He was convinced that trading could be broken down into a set of teachable rules, and that discipline, not talent, was the scarce ingredient. So the two made a wager, often compared to the movie Trading Places: recruit ordinary people, teach them a system in a couple of weeks, fund them with real capital, and see what happens.
Classified ads placed in major financial newspapers drew over a thousand applications. The group Dennis selected was deliberately eclectic. Among them were a game designer, a security guard, an accountant, and a professional card player. He called his trainees "Turtles", a nickname inspired by a turtle farm he'd visited in Singapore: he intended to grow traders the way farms grew turtles.
After roughly two weeks of training in a rules-based, trend-following approach, the Turtles traded Dennis's own money. Over the following years the group is reported to have produced more than $175 million in profits, and several went on to run successful investment firms of their own, most notably Jerry Parker's Chesapeake Capital. Dennis, by most accounts, won the bet.
- 1983The wager. Dennis and Eckhardt agree to test whether trading can be taught. Ads run in the financial press.
- 1984Second class. A follow-up group is recruited and trained on the same rules.
- 1988Program ends. The experiment winds down; many Turtles strike out on their own.
- TodayThe legacy. The original rules are public, and the experiment remains the most cited proof that systematic trading is learnable.