The Way of the Turtle

Curtis Faith was the youngest of Richard Dennis's 23 Turtles — and the one who made the most money out of the system: over $30 million in four years.

The Turtle experiment grew out of a bet between Dennis and his partner Bill Eckhardt over whether trading could be taught like a trade, or whether it depended on innate talent. Dennis recruited a mixed group of people, most with no prior market experience, and handed them a set of mechanical trend-following rules and capital to trade with.

Faith lays out, in full for the first time, the system they used: concrete entry and exit rules, how to size each position, and how to manage correlation across several open markets at once so you do not unknowingly double up on the same risk. He also gives space to the less visible part: the discipline needed to stick to those rules without improvising when a losing streak pushes you to.

It is a particularly relevant read if you trade futures, since the Turtle system was built and tested precisely in that market. It fits well whether you are after a ready-made trend-following system or simply want to understand what it really means to follow rules with absolute discipline, with no room for personal interpretation.