I would like to know if anyone heard of or tried this system and if they liked it? I ran into this site while surfing. http://turtletrader.com/firststep.html "The story of how the Turtles (neophyte non-traders) were trained to trade is one of the greatest Wall Street experiments ever. There are over 300 pages of explanation and insight at the TurtleTrader site. Take your time and go through the site in detail. Much of this content is not published outside of the TurtleTrader site."
Haven't tried it but I have spoken to them (through e-mail extensively) It seems that they have taken Donchian's work (40 day channel breakout) and added some money mgmt. The money mgmt is what they push a lot on the site. Personally I think that you don't need to spend $1000 on their program. There are no miracle systems. I would recommend that you look at their site and learn as much as you can from it (there is a lot there!) and then embark on your own search. This will be mush more rewarding than buying a canned system. I will say that they seemed rather arrogant believing their system to be *the* way to go. They even said that they were talking to CTA's to manage money according to it. This is hilarious!! That was 2 years ago and still nothing. They do provide a money back guarantee but it is rather cumbersome (requiring you to basically prove to them that the system *didn't* work through your trading records). Receiving your $1000 back would be a hollow victory since that would come about only as a result of losing much more.
The "Turtles" were a group of traders trained by Richard Dennis on a bet as to whether or not trading success was a learned skill or something inate only in certain people. You can learn more about that story in the first Market Wizards book. The turtle system is no secret. While the actual parameters of their system may be unknown (the turtles supposedly swore to keep their methods secret) it is basically a long term trend following system. Something like buy on a breakout of the highest high of the last x number of bars, sell on a stop and reverse with a signal in the opposite direction. There may be a few other things like money management rules thrown in there, but nothing magical here, just catching the big trends. That's why it worked so well in the commodity markets of the 70's and 80's...big trends. My understanding is that many of the original turtles have had problems since their earlier success. That must be the case, because the guy running the turtletrader website is now selling it instead of trading it. That's your first indication of a problem. Even Richard Dennis has had some terrible years of performance since those days. I believe that a trend following system like this can have a positive expectancy over a very long term, but you have to be very diversified (trade a basket of commodities so you are able to catch whatever is trending at the time), be happy with only a 30% winning percentage, and have VERY deep pockets, as the drawdowns will be huge. If you can stomach that, more power to you. As has been stated in many other threads on this site...don't buy into the idea that there is some "secret" formula for trading success. If it worked, they wouldn't sell it, its as plain as that. Good trading, Kirk Post Edit: I was writing this when Babak's post went up..sorry for the rehash, but it still applies.