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The Original Turtle Traders’ Trend Following System
You may have heard of the turtle traders; this was an experiment by Richard Dennis in 1983 – this guy had made a lot of money himself trading the commodity market and he had a debate with his long-time friend Bill Eckhardt. Richard argued that traders could be taught to trade well, he put an ad in the New York Times inviting people to come to him to learn how to trade. Ultimately he took 21 men and 2 women and got them to Chicago where he trained them for 2 weeks about the rules of his system. The rules of his system were very much a trend following approach; he would trade commodities, currencies and bonds. Richard Dennis would buy range breakouts so whenever any of these markets would break out of a range they would buy and add to the position as it was trending. As such Richard would pyramid aggressively into these positions – up to 25% of available capital into one trade and that’s because he continued to add when the market was favourable. He would also manage the risk by cutting the position if he was in a range bound environment. But does the turtle trading system work in today’s market environment? Probably no – some people have even backtested it. If the market is range bound you either don’t use a trend following strategy or a mean reversion one.