This was a famous experiment which proved that traders can be made and not born. It worked very well for Richard Dennis but has stopped working today. Why did it stop working?
Not exactly evidence. Here are some extracts from http://political-economy.com/stock-trading-systems/ Turtle traders –Richard Dennis knows as the ‘prince of the pits’ had a bet with a friend that he could train people to trade and get rich. He won. His team of turtles made 124 million dollars. He subsequently started Turtle trading training. When I was a stock broker, a friend of mine was trying to talk me into doing the course for like 10,000 dollars. I am glad I did not. Why? The trading system stopped working. It worked in the 1980s and up to 1996. Then it stopped. Some people have made a derivative of this system and still use it today but the core system of using stops and exits and tends does not work. This is a case study in itself. Reason profits stopped: I think technology changed and people started to trade with software. It changed the equation.
I remember in the Schwager book that the 'system' the Turtles used was basically buying new highs/selling new lows. I reckon that still works, look at some of the Nasdaq stocks over the last few months.
I would bet that it never worked. The only thing that worked was the 10,000 dollar price tag for the people collecting that money. It's not that hard to deceive even main stream publishers today that you make money trading when you don't. I forgot who published the story about a high school boy that got rich day trading. They did a big story on him. They only reason it came out that he'd actually not made any of the money that he said he had, was because his mommy and daddy forced him to tell the truth.
I'd hazard a guess most CTA's use systems not a million miles away from the original Turtles with slight variations - with fancy marketing spiel to make them sound clever to impress the investors. Saying the Turtles rules dont work is like saying trend following is dead. This is one reason why CTA's all seem to make/lose money together. It would be interesting to see some backtested results over the last 5 years of their rules (freely available on the internet now)
Years ago I purchased the turtle system from Russell Sands who was the first to leave the Turtles (a recorded version of his lectures) .It never worked for me .It also stopped working for Russell for he decided to become a lawyer( I don't know what happen with this pursuit) . A few years later he contacted me with a new scheme looking for investors to join him with others to to invest in his card counting system..in Vegas and other casinos What a hoot .cheers john