Tom R. Willis, the son of Tom Willis and close enough to Dennis to consider him an uncle, said that Dennis simply had a sense of proportion that was different from the rest of the world’s: “When he perceived that he had an edge, he would go all into a position with mammoth trading size.”

That is not to say losses are easy to accept, but Dennis and Eckhardt taught the Turtles not to consider their trading in terms of amounts of money. They wanted them to think of money as a variable, because in that way, regardless of account size, they could make the correct trading decisions at all times.

It didn’t necessarily matter how little the Turtles lost on any individual trade, but they needed to know how much they could lose in their whole portfolio. Eckhardt was clear: “The important thing is to limit portfolio risk. The trades will take care of themselves.

The successful trader is the one who codifies, the one who turns things into rules. Every idea that’s market-worthy must then be tested.”

program (and they did end up cutting people). In essence Eckhardt was saying, “You are not special. You are not smarter than the market. So follow the rules. Whoever you are and however much brains you have, it doesn’t make a hill of beans’ difference. Because if you’re facing the same issues and if you’ve got the same constraints, you must follow

Eckhardt was saying that, as with anything in life, most people know what the right thing to do is but fail to do it. Trading is no different.

“I assumed that a trader added something that couldn’t be encapsulated in a mechanical program. I was proven wrong.

This is the story of how a group of ragtag students, many with no Wall Street experience, were trained to be millionaire traders.

The Turtles were trained this way because by 1983, Dennis knew the things that worked best were “rules”: “The majority of the other things that didn’t work were judgments.