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Trading Quotes – Some Wisdom From The Turtle Traders

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by Gavin in Blog
June 5, 2011 1 comment

About 25 years ago, trading guru Richard Dennis reportedly made a bet with his long-time friend and fellow trader, William Eckhardt. Dennis believed that successful trading could be taught. This started a bet between them about whether great traders were born or made. To settle this debate, Dennis recruited and trained 21 men and 2 women, and this became a legendary trading experiment. Hollywood even took the idea and made it into a movie called “Trading Places”.

Dennis trained his Turtles, as he called them, for only two weeks. Then he gave each of them a million dollars of his own money to manage, and turned each one loose on the markets. When his experiment ended five years later, his Turtles reportedly had earned an aggregate profit of $175 million.

Curtis Faith is one of the Turtles. He has written a book about his experiences called Way of the Turtle: The Secret Methods that Turned Ordinary People into Legendary Traders.

This book is a great read and here are some fantastic quotes that helps summarize a lot of the key concepts discussed in the book:

Human emotion is both the source of opportunity in trading and the greatest challenge.
Master it and you will succeed.
Ignore it at your peril.

Trade with an edge, manage risk, be consistent, and keep it simple.
The entire Turtle training, and indeed the basis of all successful trading, can be summed up in these four core principles.

Good trading is not about being right, it’s about trading right.
If you want to be successful, you need to think of the long run and ignore the outcomes of individual trades.

Trading with an edge is what separates the professionals from amateurs.
Ignore this and you will be eaten by those who don’t.

Edges are found in the places between the battleground between buyers and sellers.
Your task as a trader is to find those places and wait to see who wins and who loses.

Mature understanding of and respect of risk is the hallmark of the best traders.
They know if you don’t keep an eye of risk, it will set its eye on you.

Ruin is the risk you should be concerned with the most.
It can come like a thief in the night and steal everything if you’re not watching carefully.

Don’t spent all your time admiring the fancy tools in the magazine.
First learn how to use the basic ones well. It’s not the size of your tools that counts but how you use them.

Keep it simple. Simple time-tested methods that are well executed will beat fancy complicated method every time.

Trading with poor methods is like learning to juggle while standing in a rowboat during the storm. Sure, it can be done, but it is much easier to juggle when one is standing on a solid ground.

Trading is not a sprint; it is boxing. The market will beat you up, screw with your head, and do anything it can to defeat you. But when the bell sounds at the end of the twelfth round, you must be standing in the ring in order to win.

The market does not care how you feel. It will not prop up your ego or console you when you are down.
Therefore, trading is not for everyone. If you are unwilling to face the truth about the markets and the truth about your own limitations, fears and failures, you will not succeed.

I always say that you could publish my trading rules in the newspaper and no one will follow them.
The key is consistency and discipline. Almost anybody can make up a list of rules that are 80% as good as what we taught our people. What they couldn’t do is give them the confidence to stick with those rules even when things are going bad.

I hope you enjoyed the above quotes and can apply them to your trading. If you did enjoy it, please share it on Facebook or post a comment below.

For more great trading related books check out my recommended reading.

1 Comment
  1. Ritesh Khanna says:

    Inspiring, thanks for sharing.

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Options Trading 101 - The Ultimate Beginners Guide To Options

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