Michael W. Covel - The Complete TurtleTrader: How 23 Novice Investors Became Overnight Millionaires

Trading was more teachable than I ever imagined. Even though I was the only one who thought it was teachable it was teachable beyond my wildest imagination.

Richard Dennis

This is the story of how a group of ragtag students, many with no Wall Street experience, were trained to be millionaire traders. Think of Donald Trumps show The Apprentice, played out in the real world with real money and real hiring and firing. However, these apprentices were thrown into the fire and challenged to make money almost immediately, with millions at stake. They werent trying to sell ice cream on the streets of New York City. They were trading stocks, bonds, currencies, oil, and dozens of other markets to make millions.

This story blows the roof off the conventional Wall Street success image so carefully crafted in popular culture: prestige, connections, and no place at the table for the little guy to beat the market (and beating the market is no small task). Legendary investor Benjamin Graham always said that analysts and fund managers as a whole could not beat the market because in a significant sense they were the market. On top of that, the academic community has argued for decades about efficient markets, once again implying there is no way to beat market averages.

Yet making big money, beating the market, is doable if you dont follow the herd, if you think outside the box. People do have a chance to win in the market game, but he or she needs the right rules and attitude to play by. And those right rules and attitude collide head-on with basic human nature.

This real-life apprentice story would still be buried had I not randomly picked up the July 1994 issue of Financial World magazine, featuring the article Wall Streets Top Players. On the cover was famed money manager George Soros playing chess. Soros had made $1.1 billion for the year. The article listed the top one hundred paid players on Wall Street for 1993, where they lived, how much they made, and in general how they made it. Soros was first. Julian Robertson was second, at $500 million. Bruce Kovner was fifth, at $200 million. Henry Kravis of KKR was eleventh at $56 million. Famed traders Louis Bacon and Monroe Trout were on the list, too.

The rankings (and earnings) provided a crystal-clear landscape of who was making Master of the Universe money. Here were, without a doubt, the top players in the game. Unexpectedly, one of them just happened to be living and working outside Richmond, Virginia, two hours from my home.

Twenty-fifth on the list was R. Jerry Parker, Jr., of Chesapeake Capitaland he had just made $35 million. Parker was not yet forty years old. His brief biography described him as a former pupil of Richard Dennis (who?) and noted that he was trained to be a Turtle (what?). Parker was described as a then twenty-five-year-old accountant who had attended Denniss school in 1983 to learn his trend-tracking system. The article also said he was a disciple of Martin Zweig (who?), who just happened to be thirty-third on the highest-paid list that year. At that moment the name Dennis was neither more nor less important than Zweig, but the implication was that these two men had made Parker extremely rich.

I studied that list intently, and Parker appeared to be the only one in the top hundred advertised as having been trained. For someone like myself, looking for ways to try and earn that kind of money, his biography was immediate inspiration, even if there were no real specifics. Here was a man who bragged that he was a product of the Virginia boondocks, loved country music, and preferred to keep as far away from Wall Street as possible. This was no typical moneymaking storythat much I knew.

The common wisdom that the only way you could find success was by working in eighty-story steel-and-glass towers in New York, London, Hong Kong, or Dubai was clearly dead wrong. Jerry Parkers office was absolutely in the middle of nowhere, thirty miles outside Richmond in Manakin-Sabot, Virginia. Soon after reading the magazine, I drove down to see his office, noting its lack of pretense, and sat in the parking lot thinking, You have got to be kidding me. This is where he makes all that money?

Malcolm Gladwell famously said, There can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis. Seeing Parkers country office was an electrical impulse for me, permanently dispelling the importance of location. But I knew nothing else at the time about Jerry Parker other than what was in that 1994 issue of Financial World. Were there more of these students? How did they become students? What were they taught? And who was this man Dennis who had taught Parker and others?

Richard Dennis was an iconoclast, a wildcatting Chicago trader not affiliated with a major investment bank or Fortune 500 firm. As the locals were fond of saying on Chicago trading floors, Dennis bet his left nut. In 1983, by the time he was thirty-seven, hed made hundreds of millions of dollars out of an initial grubstake of a few hundred. Dennis had done it on his own terms in less than fifteen years, with no formal training or guidance from anyone. He took calculated risks leveraging up huge amounts of money. If he liked a trade, he took all of it he could get. He lived the markets as a betting business.

Dennis figured out how to profit in the real world from an understanding of behavioral finance decades before Nobel prizes were handed out to professors preaching theory. His competitors could never get a handle on his consistent ability to exploit irrational market behavior throughout all types of markets. His understanding of probabilities and payoffs was freakish.

Dennis simply marched to a different drum. He eschewed publicity about his net worth even though the press speculated about it extensively. I find that kind of gauche, said Dennis. Perhaps he was reticent to focus on his wealth because what he really wanted to prove was that his earning skills were nothing special. He felt anyone could learn how to trade if taught properly.

His partner, William Eckhardt, disagreed, and their debate resulted in an experiment with a group of would-be apprentice traders recruited during 1983 and 1984 for two trading classes. That Turtle name? It was simply the nickname Dennis used for his students. He had been on a trip to Singapore and visited a turtle-breeding farm. A huge vat of squirming turtles inspired him to say, We are going to grow traders just like they grow turtles in Singapore.