How 13 Turtles Became Millionaires
Richard Dennis and Bill Eckhardt — successful and experienced traders — once made a bet. Eckhardt said only a person with a talent could become a trader. Dennis insisted “traders could be grown just like turtles!” — at the time he was really impressed by his recent tour of a turtle farm. So they decided to set up an unusual experiment…
Selection
Candidates for the experiment were selected through a newspaper publication. They had to… know nothing about exchange trading. Further selection was supposed to filter out extraordinary people and leave behind the most ordinary ones. In other words, those who were prepared to take excessive risks and were not prepared to learn were excluded from the experiment. Thus, the experimental group ended up with 13 persons who were jokingly called the “turtles”. The group also included two real traders to enable measurement of the “turtles”’ progress against them.
Training
In the course of two weeks Dennis taught the novices to read charts and develop a trading strategy accounting for risks. The “turtles” didn’t read any analytical articles, follow the news or made forecasts. There were no lectures either — there had only been one theoretical training session. For the rest of the time, novice traders guided by Dennis were creating a system of trading which they then followed mechanically. Having mastered the system, they could soon develop strategies and improve the system independently.
Conclusions
Everyone who was trained by Dennis became millionaire traders continuing to trade independently. They all traded in “trends”, i. e. suffered minor losses when the market moved sideways and made a major profit when a stable “bullish” trend was dominating the market.
Anyway, the key conclusion of the experiment was that any reasonable person could become a successful trader. Therefore, dear friends, it’s all in your hands!