Richard Dennis

Richard Dennis began trading commodity futures on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange with a $400 loan at age 17. Through disciplined application of trend-following rules and aggressive position sizing — guided by the Kelly criterion and risk management principles he developed empirically — Dennis turned that initial stake into approximately $200 million by the early 1980s, making him one of the most successful commodity traders of his era. In 1983, Dennis and his friend and fellow trader William Eckhardt made a famous bet: Eckhardt believed successful trading required innate talent, while Dennis believed it could be taught. To settle the argument they recruited 23 individuals with diverse backgrounds — the "Turtle Traders" — and taught them a complete trend-following system over two weeks. Dennis funded each with between $500,000 and $2 million to trade. The Turtles collectively generated over $175 million in profits within five years, largely validating Dennis's thesis that systematic rules could be taught and applied consistently. The Turtle experiment remains the most famous case study in trading education and inspired countless systematic traders. Dennis himself suffered significant drawdowns in the late 1980s and 2000s, illustrating that even the most gifted systematic traders face periods of strategy underperformance.