Today I would like to share some really great and unique takeaways from a conversation I had with the one and only Richard Dennis, the father of the Turtle Project from back in the 1980’s as well as two of his turtles, namely Brian Proctor and Jerry Parker. In our conversation we put the record straight for the first time on a number of myths about the Turtle experiment including How the Turtles got their name, and if the original rules that were applied with great success 30+ years ago would still be relevant today, and also how long it took Jerry and Brian to make sense of them. So let’s get straight to it, starting off with the very beginning of The Turtle story. If you want to catch the full episode then just go click here

How The Turtle Got It's Name

Niels: Now there has, over the last three decades, been so much talk about how this trading experiment was named: what the inspiration for the Turtle name really was. Some people say that it was related to you seeing a turtle farm in Singapore I think I heard, and another story I heard was it was related to a rock band called The Turtles that performed back then. Why don't you put us all out of suspense and share with us the true story about how the name came about.

"...you're going to get a "Heavens NO!" on that one"

Richard: I'm going to stick with the first story about the turtles in Singapore. That actually, that's how they got the name, it was kind of a misnomer but it sort of stuck. If I had a dollar for every plastic turtle that people have given me, I'd be indeed rich.

Niels: But also, talking about the name itself, and I wonder whether seeing the turtles in Singapore or something that happened years before you did the program, but I also wanted to talk about the inspiration for the idea behind creating the Turtle Program. Again, we hear so many stories relating to, one that seems to be very popular is that you and your partner back then, Bill Eckhardt, having seen the movie Trading Places with Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy, where there was a bet made about how you could train anyone to be successful in trading.

Richard: That you're going to get a "Heavens NO!" on that one.

Niels: Oh well good! Excellent, excellent! Well, can you share with us how the whole idea behind the Turtle Program came about?

Richard: Sure, so one lazy Sunday afternoon I was hanging out with Johnny Walker Black, and I started to think about my own trading and realized that a lot of it was just sort of rules that were informal and that I noticed that other traders operated according to rules. Also, some of those rules were very bad, like a lot of traders at that time, their one rule was always buy soy beans.

Having thought about my trading and the rules, it seemed to me that, at that time, just to put a number on it, I thought that two-thirds of trading was following rules and maybe one-third was intuition - the dreaded flare that we talked about during the course and that. So, as the ice cubes melted, I started to make some notes about what I thought was true; what you could do to prove it. It could turn out to be one of those endless debates that never comes to any conclusion. It seemed to me that we could resolve the question by trying to train people and giving them rules and talking to them about intuition and things like that, and that was the genesis. And nobody told me it was a great idea, but nobody wanted to tell me it was stupid either, so we did it

Niels: Sure, sure.

How long before the actual program started? Was this something that you reacted on very quickly and said, "Yeah, this is a great idea, let me do it." Or did it have to sink in for a while before you created the program?

Richard: It was only a couple of months before we put the things in motion, like advertisements in newspapers, that lead to starting in January of '84.