Richard Dennis
This success in trading earned him the nickname "King of the Pits", and fame that has lasted to this day. He is also known for his social experiment that he thought up in the 80s with his trading business partner William Eckhardt known as The Turtles Experiment, which was the basis for the storyline in the 80s film "Trading Places", starring Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd. The experiment had its origins in the discussions Dennis had with Eckhardt, in which they debated whether trading was something people were born with, or something that could be learned. To test this, they set up an experiment to train traders "like they grow turtles in Singapore", thus the name. The pair recruited with an New York Times ad 24 willing volunteers, 22 men and two women, in two groups with the technical analysis system that had made Richard Dennis a fortune of $200 million and gave them money to trade the system. The results from that experiment are somewhat clouded in secrecy but some details are known to public. For one, the trading success of these volunteers varied from one to another. This result has been contributed to the fact that the Turtles had to make choices in their trading, using a breakout system in which there were two breakout periods, a 20 day one and 40 day one, both signaling a signal to buy or sell. Not all people lasted the whole program, which started in 1983/1984 and ended in 1988, and some dropped out within first two years of trading. There have been reports suggesting that the program was ended because of the losses Dennis made in the crash of the 1987, to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. Some have contributed these loss of a good portion of his fortune to his deviation from his own trading principles, which were originally 100% technical analysis based. The trading system that Richard Dennis had used and thought was for a long time a "holy grail" of trading, due to the fact that he had used it so successfully and revealed it to so many, making it potentially one of the very few proven trading systems to be released publicly. However, the Turtles, having signed a non-disclosure agreement with Dennis, did not reveal their trading system details to the public despite efforts to get the information, until the rules were revealed by a Turtle named Curtis Faith in a free ebook called "the Original Turtle Rules", which is no longer available from its original source, but is still circulating in the internet. That ebook led to several book about the Turtles and about the Turtle/Richard Dennis trading system, both from Curtis Faith and from an admirer of the turtle trading system, Michael Covel, who also publishes the pivotal turtle trading website, turtletrader.com. Of the original Turtles, the best known disciple is Jerry Parker, who has been running a successful fund called the Chesapeake Capital for years. Most of the Turtles have returned to lives outside of trading, and do not wish, for better or worse, to be associated with the Turtles fame. |