DVD Review: The Original Turtle Trading Rules

The "Prince of the Pit", Richard J. Dennis, was a successful and profitable trader. To settle a wager and prove that trading is not the domain of the select few, but rather it can be taught to anyone Dennis recruited and trained 24 people to trade. The Prince of the Pit taught the original 24 his trading secrets, and lent them millions of his own money to trade with. The result? The original recruits (Turtles, as they were called) went one to amass hundreds of millions of dollars in profit. Enter Russell Sands, one of the original Turtles recruited and trained to trade. In The Original Turtle Trading Rules, Sands lays out the rules he and a lucky few were taught by Richard Dennis.

REVIEW

This DVD is not a historical biography of Dennis, nor a historical documentary of the original 24 turtles. If you want to know what the Turtle trading strategy is, then this DVD is what you’re looking for. It describes the Turtle trading strategy in detail, ways to implement it, and provides large number of applications of the trading strategy using stocks, commodities, and even currencies. Traders who trade in stocks, commodities, and futures can take advantage of this system, but so can purely “stock traders” vis-à-vis commodity ETFs.

I will not steal Sands’ thunder and describe The Turtle trading system, but suffice it to say that it is a trending system that does not require you to be in front of the computer all day long, monitoring every 1-minute bar.

PROS

1. The DVD does what it advertises: it describes the Turtle trading system, and gives plenty of examples on how to implement the system using stocks, commodities, and currencies.
2. The DVD is long enough to describe everything in detail with lots of examples, but short enough to prevent it from becoming redundant and overkill.
3. A good entry-level introduction of trading basics for anyone who is interested in trading on their own account (covering: reacting to market vs. predicting the market, influence of information & noise on prices, exit strategies, money management rules, and other important trading principles).

CONS

1. Initially, Sands jumps around a lot in the DVD, making it hard (and irritating) to follow him. Fortunately, the rest of the DVD becomes more coherent and organized.
2. The author could have used fewer examples for price action being influenced by information vs. noise (a few examples made his point, it was not necessary to go on and on).
3. The money management principles could have been more robust (it’s very basic, intended for the novice trader).
4. It would have been great to have a section on P&L (tracking winning/losing trades in an attempt to improve entries and exits, etc).

Comments

[TinyTim:]

If Sands was as successful as the Turtle I know, why does he need to waste time on a DVD?

I've been told that Dennis system was original in its day, but is old hat now. And not real effective anymore. Sounds like Sands is pushing a basic intro to trading by revealing old "secrets."

Also, that "Trading Places" mythology for the creation of the Turtles sounds good, but I was told it was in response to CFTC rule changes limiting position sizes as a result of the Hunt Bros run at the silver market in 1979-80.

I wonder if Sands still has the WSJ ad that Dennis placed looking for prospective Turtles.

Sep 12 01:06 PM