Ed Seykota

Ed Seykota studied electrical engineering at MIT and joined Commodities Corporation in the early 1970s, where he built one of the first fully computerised commodity trading systems at a time when most traders relied on paper charts and human discretion. His models tracked price trends across commodity futures using exponential moving averages and systematic rules — an approach that seems obvious today but was radical in the pre-personal-computer era. According to Jack Schwager's account in "Market Wizards," Seykota managed a client account that grew from $5,000 to approximately $15 million over 12 years — a compounding performance rivalled by very few traders in history. Seykota mentored several traders who would become influential in their own right, including Michael Marcus, who went on to extraordinary returns at Commodities Corporation. He later founded the Trading Tribe, a group and methodology that combines psychological self-awareness with trading performance improvement. Seykota is notable for his integration of technical trading with human psychology — he argues that traders' emotional patterns are often more determinative of outcome than their systems, and that work on personal psychology is essential to trading success. He is also known for pithy aphorisms, most famously: "The trend is your friend until the end when it bends."