Mark Dooley’s review of “The Complete TurtleTrader”.

I mention in my book that not all Turtles were cooperative. However, since “The Complete TurtleTrader” has been released three of those uncooperative Turtles have now offered feedback. The three included:

1. A Turtle who never responded to my interview request.
2. A Turtle who declined my interview request.
3. A Turtle who I never was even able to track down.

I have now heard from all three of these Turtles. Their feedback in the form of emails, a card and phone calls? They all liked “The Complete TurtleTrader”. And since this is by and large a very closed mouthed group that seeks privacy even to this day, I was surprised to hear from them.

Stocks, Futures, Options Magazine has named “The Complete TurtleTrader” as one of their top 10 recommendations among the best-selling trading, investing and personal finance books of 2007:

Chidem Kurdas, New York Bureau Chief for Hedgeworld, recently posted a review of “The Complete TurtleTrader” titled “The Making of Traders”.

Non-fiction:

1. (1) English As It Is Broken by The Straits Times
2. (3) The Secret by Rhonda Byrne
3. (2) The Age Of Turbulence by Alan Greenspan
4. (4) Marley And Me: Life And Love With The World’s Worst Dog
5. (5) The Complete TurtleTrader by Michael W. Covel
6. (6) Think Big And Kick Ass by Donald Trump and Bill Zanker
7. (7) I Can Make You Rich by Paul McKenna
8. (8) Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light by Mother Teresa
9. (9) Feng Shui For Apartment Buyers by Joey Yap
10. (10) The Secret Revealed by James L. Garlow and Rick Marschall

I posted an excerpt to Pardo’s review earlier, but here is his final review from the December 2007 Futures Magazine:

“This is an excellent book for those interested in systematic trading, Richard Dennis, the Turtle “experiment,” the Turtle trading method and the history of trading, but it should not be considered complete from the vantage of a professional algorithmic trader. However, it is the best account of the Turtles so far. It is a quick, easy, fun and interesting read. Covel provides a thorough and accurate historical account of the Turtles from the start to the finish of this experiment. For those unfamiliar with the story, Richard Dennis was widely considered one of, if not the, most successful trader of his era, the 1980s. He and partner William Eckhardt disagreed whether trading is an inborn talent or something that can be learned. They proposed an experiment to discover which was true: the Turtle Project. Covel begins with a description of the thinking behind the Turtle project and recaps the story of recruiting and training the first Turtles, including some of their thinking and experiences during and through the conclusion of the project, which Dennis ended without warning. Covel continues the story with a brief rendition of life for the Turtles after the project. A handful continued as professional traders. The most successful Turtle has been Jerry Parker of Chesapeake Capital. Covel spends a bit too much time on Parker, as interesting and successful as he has been. It would have been interesting if there had been more about the other Turtles post-project lives, but the lack thereof is not entirely Covel’s fault. Anyone who has had much contact with Dennis and the Turtles can attest to their almost paranoid secrecy about the project, and that clearly hindered Covel’s project. Covel suggests that Dennis and the Turtles achieved a milestone in trading and not only established systematic trading as respectable, but also set the bar high. They ventured into new territory and encountered great success. Read the book. There are some interesting trading pearls to be had. They are not identified as such, but they are there nonetheless. Enjoy it. I did.”

Robert Pardo is the president of Pardo Capital Ltd., Group Ltd. and Analytics Ltd. He has worked as a trader, money manager, educator, analyst and software designer. Reach him at www.pardocapital.com.

The following review of “The Complete TurtleTrader” by James Pressley appears on Bloomberg today:

***

Nov. 21 (Bloomberg) — With the dollar sinking, oil rising and hog futures slumping, this market looks ripe for the Turtles.

I’m not talking about the soda-pop band girls grooved on in the 1960s, “so happy together.” The Turtles I mean are the trend followers trained by trading heavy Richard J. Dennis.

Dennis was the wizard of the Chicago pit in the ’70s and ’80s. By age 37, he had made “hundreds of millions of dollars out of an initial grubstake of a few hundred,” as Michael W. Covel recalls in “The Complete TurtleTrader,” an absorbing inquiry into how Dennis and his partner taught novices to trade.

Dennis maintained that anyone, with the right training, could become a successful trader. His partner, William Eckhardt, disagreed. To settle the debate, they trained apprentices, then handed them $1 million apiece to trade for the firm.

“We are going to grow traders just like they grow turtles in Singapore,” Dennis said after seeing a breeding farm there.

Recruited from classified ads, the Turtles had little in common but smarts. They included a Czechoslovakian-born blackjack master, a fantasy-game designer and an evangelical accountant. A Harvard MBA made the cut, along with a former pianist who had dropped out of med school.

Dennis and Eckhardt put them up in Chicago’s staid Union League Club, with its wood paneling and oriental carpets, and gave them two weeks of training in January 1984. The rules they learned “would have made investors like Warren Buffett cringe,” Covel writes.

Forget about buying low, holding and selling high. The Turtles were taught to buy when a price was rising and to sell when it was falling. This was trading in its purest form.

It mattered not whether they were dealing in soybeans or International Business Machines Corp. All they needed to know about the thing being traded was its current price and usual volatility: If Microsoft Corp. on a typical day bobs between $48 and $52, a Turtle would say its volatility is four.

Beyond that, they needed to track how much money they had after each trade, because they would trade only a set percentage of what was left.

The Turtles entered trades when a market — be it gold, yen or cattle — broke through a recent high or low. They would buy, for example, if the price was the highest in the last 55 days. Then they “pyramided” their trades, adding money to winners until they reached a predetermined exit point.

Because little losses from “false breakouts” could devour capital, Turtles scaled back their bets during losing streaks.

Dennis and Eckhardt resembled “a mass merchandiser who sold 90 percent of their products as loss leaders so they could make a gigantic profit on the remaining 10 percent.”

Though Covel brings the experiment to life, there’s only so much narrative tension to be squeezed from traders sitting at metal desks in a Spartan office, marking charts and making unemotional calculations on loose-leaf paper without even a TV to distract them. If a market wasn’t moving, a Turtle didn’t trade.

Still, Covel excels in explaining how the system works and describing “second-generation” Turtles like Salem Abraham, who built his trading business in rural Texas. Most beat-the-market books aren’t worth my shelf space. This one is.

“The Complete TurtleTrader” just made The Singapore Straits Times top 10 bestselling list for non-fiction for the 4th week in a row. Still not sure how that demand got stirred up!

1. (1) The Secret by Rhonda Byrne
2. (2) English As It Is Broken by The Straits Times
3. (3) The Age Of Turbulence by Alan Greenspan
4. (4) Marley And Me: Life And Love With The World’s Worst Dog
5. (5) Think Big And Kick Ass by Donald Trump and Bill Zanker
6. (6) The Complete TurtleTrader by Michael W. Covel
7. (7) Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light by Mother Teresa
8. (8) Feng Shui For Apartment Buyers by Joey Yap
9. (9) I Can Make You Rich by Paul McKenna
10. (10) Why We Want You To Be Rich by Donald J. Trump

Bob Pardo reviews “The Complete TurtleTrader” in the December issue of Futures Magazine. An excerpt:

Suffice it to say that Covel’s speculations about the significance of Dennis and the Turtles are interesting and ones with which I agree. He suggests that Dennis and the Turtles established a milestone in trading and not only established systematic trading as respectable, but set the bar rather high. The simple truth is that Dennis and the Turtles accomplished something that had never been done before and at a very high level of quality and success. Read the book. There are some interesting trading “pearls” to be had in this book. They are not identified as such, but they are there nonetheless. Enjoy it. I did.

The December issue of Trader Monthly has several Turtle related articles including this one (PDF) I authored that covers Richard Dennis to Jerry Parker to Salem Abraham. Beyond the magazine readers may find the contrast between Jerry Parker and not successful Turtles even more illuminating. The first link is a trading presentation by Parker. The second link is a self-produced political video by a Turtle who doesn’t trade. The two presentations are a great illustration why some Turtles made it and why some did not. Bottom line, twenty years after the ending of the Turtle experiment it is Jerry Parker, the most successful Turtle, who provides the winning trading lessons.

Grady Harp is one of Amazon’s Top 10 reviewers. His review of my book “The Complete TurtleTrader”:

Michael W. Covel has managed to master the art of writing about the stock market, namely the story of the infamous ‘Turtle Trader’ group, by including all the ‘in-house’ information and language and statistics while adjusting the significant bit of history into a narrative that reads like a novel. For the reader who knows little about the stock market and the means by which it trades and responds/creates the economic climate of this country, this book is a fascinating insight into an actual experiment where it was proven that financial wizards are not necessarily born (‘nature’) to their wealthy destiny, but instead can be ordinary people (yes, like us) who can be ‘nurtured’ by wise teachers to learn the ropes of the sacrosanct.

Covel seduces us in his well-written Preface: ‘People do have a chance to win in the market game, but he or she needs the right rules and the attitude to play by. And those right rules and attitude collide head-on with basic human nature.’ And there he has us, as neophytes, well in hand into exploring his well documented, thorough, and (most important for neophytes) well written book THE COMPLETE TURTLE TRADER: THE LEGEND, THE LESSONS, THE RESULTS. What follows is a fine background of two big, philosophically disparate money men – Richard J. Dennis and William Eckhardt – who created the Turtle Traders in 1983, a group of men/women who responded to a newspaper ad, coming from widely different backgrounds, and learned the basic rules of trading and investing using the money of the mentors. How they did this and the success they achieved proved conclusively that learning to become wealthy in the money market CAN be learned.

To make this book interest sustaining in nature, Covel identifies the Turtle Traders and follows their group and individual histories in a manner that approaches a screenplay. We get to know them, feel their development, learn of their power plays that result in monumental gains and equally huge losses, and in doing so Covel personalizes his data, adding the follow-up history of this select group to bring a since of closure to his well researched book. And for a book about something as potentially obtuse and foreign to the market-challenged reader, Covel has succeeded in making a page-turner! This strongly written book should be in the library of every person who deals with the Wall Street life, but it is also a tantalizing insider’s look at how the mystique of the money baron bubble can be popped!

Grady Harp, November 07

I saw a “correction” at TheStreet.com today of Marek Fuchs’ review of my book “The Complete TurtleTrader”:

By TSC Staff
10/29/2007 10:18 AM EDT

An Oct. 27 Marek Fuchs column, Wolves in Turtles’ Clothing, said that Michael Covel ran the test discussed in his book. In fact, Covel wrote about the test, but did not run it. TheStreet.com regrets the error. (Corrected Oct. 29)

The only thing that comes to mind for me when I see their “correction” are the lyrics to David Bowie’s Space Oddity…these guys are either plain lost or they are intent on confusing issues on purpose.