The Complete TurtleTrader: How 23 Novice Investors Became Overnight Millionaires [Paperback]

Michael W. Covel (Author)

Book Description

Release date: February 24, 2009

What happens when ordinary people are taught a system to make extraordinary money?

Richard Dennis made a fortune on Wall Street by investing according to a few simple rules. Convinced that great trading was a skill that could be taught to anyone, he made a bet with his partner and ran a classified ad in the Wall Street Journal looking for novices to train. His recruits, later known as the Turtles, had anything but traditional Wall Street backgrounds; they included a professional blackjack player, a pianist, and a fantasy game designer. By the time the experiment ended, Dennis had made a hundred million dollars from his Turtles and created one killer Wall Street legend.

In The Complete TurtleTrader, Michael W. Covel tells their riveting story with the first ever on-the-record interviews with individual Turtles. He shows how Dennis's rules worked—and can still work today—for any investor with the desire and commitment to learn from one of the greatest investing stories of all time.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Covel (Trend Following) revisits a famous financial trading experiment conducted by Wall Street trader Richard Dennis and extracts its lessons with mixed results. Dennis, who quickly learned how to trade after starting as a runner at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in 1966 at age 17, had made a reported $200 million by 1983. To settle an argument with fellow trader William Eckhardt about whether trading ability was innate or could be taught, he put an ad in the Wall Street Journal offering to teach candidates how to trade in two weeks, and then backed them with his own money. Of the thousands of people who who applied, 23 turtles were accepted. Their trading made $100 million for Dennis, leading some to become highly successful traders in their own right. Having tracked down most of the people involved, Covel describes the turtle training, including rules for entering and exiting trades as well as Dennis and Eckhardt's personal lessons, and speculates on why some turtles succeeded more than others. However, there are too many characters with competing interests, and many missing facts. Covel's own strong views can also get more emphasis than the voices of the principals. Still, the book is a useful training manual distilling the lessons of a fascinating experiment. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

“Tells the ‘real stories’ rather than just the glossy good bits—a thoroughly good read.” (Your Trading Edge )

“This warmly written book brilliantly captures the formation and evolution of the legendary Turtle investment program. It is loaded with wonderful anecdotal insights plus lessons on trading, risk, and life we should all follow. It should be on any novice or seasoned trader’s bookshelf alike. A must read!” (Michael Shannon, Original Turtle )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: HarperBusiness (February 24, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061241717
• ISBN-13: 978-0061241710
• Product Dimensions: 5.3 x 0.7 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (200 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #44,934 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #20 in Books > Business & Investing > Investing > Commodities
  • #82 in Books > Business & Investing > Investing > Stocks

More About the Author

Michael Covel passionately teaches the lessons of the great traders who have made their fortunes over the last four decades. Forget Buy and Hold and CNBC; those are not Michael's game. His subject of choice is an obscure trading style called 'trend following trading' that has produced untold millionaires and a few billionaires. It is a style of trading ignored by the mainstream press, all universities and much of Wall Street. Michael is now considered the point person on trend following trading.

In 1996 Michael co-launched a website titled TurtleTrader.com®. It has attracted millions of visitors and thousands of clients all looking for insights into trend following trading. The journey to uncover the secretive world of the most successful money makers around, cracking their 'code' so to speak, honed Michael's investigative skills and built TurtleTrader.com®.

Following on the success of TurtleTrader®, Michael's first book Trend Following: How Great Traders Make Millions in Up or Down Markets (FT Press, Apr. 04, Nov. 05, Feb. 07 and Feb. 09) hit the streets. It profiled great trend following traders and explained trend following in print for the first time. It quickly became a bestseller and has sold over 100,000 copies. It is available in German, Japanese, Chinese (Complex and Simplified), Korean, French, Arabic, Turkish and Russian. The book struck a chord with individual and professional investors alike.

Michael's second book The Complete TurtleTrader: The Legend, the Lessons, the Results (Collins, Oct. 07 and Feb. 09) is different. It is the definitive behind the scenes look at a real life trading legend. It is a narrative account of super-trader Richard Dennis and his student traders nicknamed the 'Turtles'. You think trading success only happens for people born with a silver spoon? This book will prove you wrong! It is the true story of nurture trumping nature and has become an inspirational lynch-pin for tens of thousands.

Following his two books Michael directed his debut documentary film Broke. It premiered on 'The Documentary Channel' in October 2009. It explores human behavior (read: behavioral finance) during the 2007-2009 market crash. It is Michael's 75,000 mile odyssey through a Tokyo fish market, a Virginia sheep farm, a lottery store and Las Vegas and Macau poker tables all to learn how and why we make so many wrong financial decisions.

Michael and his team shot the film in 13 major cities and packed it with big time names in the trading world (Larry Hite, Jim Rogers, David Harding, Mark Mobius, and Bill Miller to name a few). Michael also conducted face-to-face interviews with legendary Nobel Prize winners Dr. Harry Markowitz and Dr. Vernon Smith. Michael's film is a non-partisan, timeless and common sense message that everyone can embrace.

www.michaelcovel.com/about

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

87 of 93 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Pulling Back the Veil December 2, 2007

By John Forman

Format:Hardcover

The first impression one gets from The Complete Turtle Trader is quite favorable. It is an attractive format, and a pretty easy read, though well written and detailed. The primary text is about 200 pages, which I got through in a single afternoon (though I do read faster than most). And the price tag is extremely reasonable for a hardcover trading book, much lower than what you often see.

This book definitely continues along the path of the trend trading subject of Covel's earlier book, Trend Following, but does so through the story of the famous Turtles. Readers of Jack Schwager's book, Market Wizards, and it's follow-up, The New Market Wizards, will be familiar with the Turtles. They are the result of a nature vs. nurture running debate between famous futures trader Richard Dennis (a Market Wizard) and his partner William Eckhardt (profiled in The New Market Wizards).

The Turtle program was an effort to determine whether traders can be created, developed through training as opposed to having some innate talent for it. This topic has been the subject of debates in trading circles for probably as long as there has been traders. To a certain degree, the classic movie Trading Places, which was released very near the time of the first Turtle program, has at it's core the same theme.

In The Complete Turtle Trader, as the subtitle suggests, Covel tells the story of the Turtles from the selection process which brought together two very diverse groups of people in 1983 and 1984 all the way through to where they are today. It includes a discussion of their training program, their performance, and of course the ideas underlying the system they employed, one based on trend following. The explanation of the latter is pretty direct - definitely enough to give the reader a really good idea of the way the Turtles were taught to trade, which they did very successfully. Figures to that end are provided throughout the text and in supporting appendices. The author also includes comments on how individual traders can apply the Turtle techniques and philosophy themself.

For someone like myself, who first heard about the Turtles through Schwager's writings, this book was a really interesting back-filling of the story. When Schwager was putting his books together, the Turtles and their instructors were very tight-lipped about the details of the experience. In this book, Covel has been able to flesh things out, not just in a kind of history text sort of exposition, but one which includes a great many comments and annecdotes from the participants. It is a tale which really explores the whole perspective of life as a Turtle.

The story Covel lays out offers a great many insights. Obviously, the first one is that learning how to trade, and to make big returns, is possible. Probably the most interesting part of the narrative, though, (in terms of the story, anyway) is what happened to the Turtles after they left the program. It will come as no surprise that the diversity of their backgrounds and personalities has been reflected in the diversity of what they have done over the intervening years. I was particularly enthralled by the discussion of the adjustments they had to make to be successful as big-time money managers, something their mentor Dennis was never quite able to do.

Overall I consider The Complete Turtle Trader a very enjoyable and worthwhile read. It has a lot of elements, and of course trading strategy. I actually found reinforcement of many of my own trading ideas as I was reading, seeing them in a different light. That's not something which happens much after twenty years of trading and reading books and articles on the subject. Of course not everyone is going to find the fullness of the theory or application behind Turtle trading suitable to them, but it is always worth making an effort to learn from those who have achieved success before us, and that's an opportunity this book provides.

113 of 123 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars I couldn't put this book down. Excellent research combined with detailed facts November 4, 2007

By K. Corn TOP 100 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

In The Complete TurtleTraders, author Michael W. Covel tells the riveting account of a group of investors who were led by one remarkable man, Richard Dennis (with the help of his partner, William Eckhardt). Dennis was somewhat of an iconoclast, not brought up through the ranks of Fortune 500 company grooming programs, figuring out his own methods for making money.

Dennis was a successful investor who believed that investing
principles could be taught to anyone. His partner, William Eckhardt, disagreed, tending to believe that the talent was inborn. Their differing views formed the basis for a bet between the two men and led to one of the more remarkable experiments in investing history.

Basically, Dennis agreed to find a diverse group of individuals, give each recruit $1 million dollars, put them through two weeks of intensive training, teach them specific investing principles and methods and see how well they'd do after that. To add to the challenge, Dennis and his partner (who agreed to help teach the recruits) hired people from all walks of life.

Exactly how diverse was the group? Well, there was a security guard, a restaurant manger, an unemployed student, a bartender, kitchen cook, teacher and even a prison worker. Covel describes in detail how Dennis
interviewed and selected each recruit, nicknaming them "The Turtles". He also chronicles their 14 days of intensive training. It wasn't easy but the potential rewards were great.

While the account of the Turtles' experiences is reason enough to buy this book, I want to stress that it is more than the story of that remarkable group of individuals. It is also the profile of Richard Dennis, his background and his own conflicting feelings as the experiment
concluded and a second generation of Turtles came along. At times, it is hard to wonder if the Turtles succeeded too well, leading to mixed feelings in Richard Dennis as some of them surpassed him.

Covel also updates readers about some of the Turtles today. The book is so full of investing principles, guidelines and rules that I don't know how anyone with an interest in learning more about investing, trading or finances could pass this one up!

56 of 61 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The human side of Trading October 27, 2007

By E. Paradis

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Covel's book is an excellent, in depth look into the personalities of Dennis, Eckhardt and the "Turtles" they trained and mentored. We get a great view into the humanity of the organization that started large scale systematic trading in a time when most traders were addicted to fundamentals ( some things haven't changed in that regard).

The emotional highs and lows, the risks, the luck, and the losses are methodically organized and documented. History was written as it happened on the trading floor. In short, its a clear, concise read and is a new addition to Covel's first book, Trend following.