Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
Share Top Traders Unplugged
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Or
Top Traders Unplugged
Based on Podcast App listening data
Top Traders Unplugged episodes
- SI04: Stanley Druckenmiller interview disected
Welcome to The Systematic Investor series. It’s a great privilege for me to invite you to a behind the scenes conversation between some of my favorite systematic investors namely Jerry Parker and Moritz Seibert. We get on a “call” each week to discuss the events that took place through the lens of a Systematic Investor and how the trading strategies we work with are reacting. It’s a raw and honest exploration and we hope you will join and be part of…not least by sending us questions that we can discuss.
-----
50 YEARS OF TREND FOLLOWING BOOK AND BEHIND-THE-SCENES VIDEO FOR ACCREDITED INVESTORS - CLICK HERE
-----
Follow Niels on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube or via the TTU website.
IT’s TRUE ? – most CIO’s read 50+ books each year – get your FREE copy of the Ultimate Guide to the Best Investment Books ever written here.
And you can get a free copy of my latest book “Ten Reasons to Add Trend Following to Your Portfolio” here.
Learn more about the Trend Barometer here.
Send your questions to [email protected]
And please share this episode with a like-minded friend and leave an honest Rating & Review on iTunes or Spotify so more people can discover the podcast.
Episode TimeStamps:
00:00 – Intro
01:00 – Weekly recap of performance
05:15 – Top tweets (lengthy discussion of Druckenmiller interview)
35:00 – Question 1: Barry; Do you use synthetic instruments in your trading?
38:20 – Benchmark performance update
39:15 – Jerry on Trend + Fundamentals
Copyright © 2025 – CMC AG – All Rights Reserved
----
PLUS: Whenever you're ready... here are 3 ways I can help you in your investment Journey:
1. eBooks that cover key topics that you need to know about
In my eBooks, I put together some key discoveries and things I have learnt during the more than 3 decades I have worked in the Trend Following industry, which I hope you will find useful. Click Here
2. Daily Trend Barometer and Market Score
One of the things I’m really proud of, is the fact that I have managed to published the Trend Barometer and Market Score each day for more than a decade...as these tools are really good at describing the environment for trend following managers as well as giving insights into the general positioning of a trend following strategy! Click Here
3. Other Resources that can help you
And if you are hungry for more useful resources from the trend following world...check out some precious resources that I have found over the years to be really valuable. Click Here
Privacy Policy
Disclaimer
43 min - BO03: How the Turtles got their Name… and are the Rules Relevant Today?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 hereHow The Turtle Got It's NameNiels: 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 itNiels: 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 '84.12 min
- Best of TTU – How the Turtles got their Name… and are the Turtle Rules Relevant Today?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 hereHow The Turtle Got It's NameNiels: 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 itNiels: 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 '84.12 min
- BO03: How the Turtles got their Name… and are the Rules Relevant Today?
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.
Listen to the full episode here.
-----
50 YEARS OF TREND FOLLOWING BOOK AND BEHIND-THE-SCENES VIDEO FOR ACCREDITED INVESTORS - CLICK HERE
-----
Follow Niels on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube or via the TTU website.
IT’s TRUE ? – most CIO’s read 50+ books each year – get your FREE copy of the Ultimate Guide to the Best Investment Books ever written here.
And you can get a free copy of my latest book “Ten Reasons to Add Trend Following to Your Portfolio” here.
Learn more about the Trend Barometer here.
Send your questions to [email protected]
And please share this episode with a like-minded friend and leave an honest Rating & Review on iTunes or Spotify so more people can discover the podcast.
Copyright © 2025 – CMC AG – All Rights Reserved
----
PLUS: Whenever you're ready... here are 3 ways I can help you in your investment Journey:
1. eBooks that cover key topics that you need to know about
In my eBooks, I put together some key discoveries and things I have learnt during the more than 3 decades I have worked in the Trend Following industry, which I hope you will find useful. Click Here
2. Daily Trend Barometer and Market Score
One of the things I’m really proud of, is the fact that I have managed to published the Trend Barometer and Market Score each day for more than a decade...as these tools are really good at describing the environment for trend following managers as well as giving insights into the general positioning of a trend following strategy! Click Here
3. Other Resources that can help you
And if you are hungry for more useful resources from the trend following world...check out some precious resources that I have found over the years to be really valuable. Click Here
Privacy Policy
Disclaimer
12 min - SI03: Should you trade Futures or ETFs?Welcome to The Systematic Investor series. It's a great privilege for me to invite you to a behind the scenes conversation between some of my favorite systematic investors namely Jerry Parker and Moritz Seibert. We get on a "call" each week to discuss the events that took place through the lens of a Systematic Investor and how the trading strategies we work with are reacting. It's a raw and honest exploration and we hope you will join and be part of...not least by sending us questions that we can discuss. Please send your questions to [email protected]Episode Summary0:00 - Intro1:00 - Weekly recap (and a lot more this week)27:50 - Top tweets40:50 - Question 1: Craig; What are the greatest regulatory concerns at present?49:00 - Question 2: Francois; How long did it take before you stopped modifying and religiously followed your system?56:30 - Question 3: Francois; What are the pros and cons of futures vs ETFs?59:30- Performance recapSubscribe on:1 hr 2 min
- 03 The Systematic Investor Series – September 30th, 2018Welcome to The Systematic Investor series. It's a great privilege for me to invite you to a behind the scenes conversation between some of my favorite systematic investors namely Jerry Parker and Moritz Seibert. We get on a "call" each week to discuss the events that took place through the lens of a Systematic Investor and how the trading strategies we work with are reacting. It's a raw and honest exploration and we hope you will join and be part of...not least by sending us questions that we can discuss. Please send your questions to [email protected]Episode Summary0:00 - Intro1:00 - Weekly recap (and a lot more this week)27:50 - Top tweets40:50 - Question 1: Craig; What are the greatest regulatory concerns at present?49:00 - Question 2: Francois; How long did it take before you stopped modifying and religiously followed your system?56:30 - Question 3: Francois; What are the pros and cons of futures vs ETFs?59:30- Performance recapSubscribe on:1 hr 2 min
- SI03: Should you trade Futures or ETFs?
Welcome to The Systematic Investor series. It’s a great privilege for me to invite you to a behind the scenes conversation between some of my favorite systematic investors namely Jerry Parker and Moritz Seibert. We get on a “call” each week to discuss the events that took place through the lens of a Systematic Investor and how the trading strategies we work with are reacting. It’s a raw and honest exploration and we hope you will join and be part of…not least by sending us questions that we can discuss.
-----
50 YEARS OF TREND FOLLOWING BOOK AND BEHIND-THE-SCENES VIDEO FOR ACCREDITED INVESTORS - CLICK HERE
-----
Follow Niels on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube or via the TTU website.
IT’s TRUE ? – most CIO’s read 50+ books each year – get your FREE copy of the Ultimate Guide to the Best Investment Books ever written here.
And you can get a free copy of my latest book “Ten Reasons to Add Trend Following to Your Portfolio” here.
Learn more about the Trend Barometer here.
Send your questions to [email protected]
And please share this episode with a like-minded friend and leave an honest Rating & Review on iTunes or Spotify so more people can discover the podcast.
Episode TimeStamps:
00:00 – Intro
01:00 – Weekly recap of performance
27:50 – Top tweets
40:50 – Question 1: Craig; What are the greatest regulatory concerns at present?
49:00 – Question 2: Francois; How long did it take before you stopped modifying and religiously followed your system?
56:30 – Question 3: Francois; What are the pros and cons of futures vs ETFs?
59:30- Benchmark performance update
Copyright © 2025 – CMC AG – All Rights Reserved
----
PLUS: Whenever you're ready... here are 3 ways I can help you in your investment Journey:
1. eBooks that cover key topics that you need to know about
In my eBooks, I put together some key discoveries and things I have learnt during the more than 3 decades I have worked in the Trend Following industry, which I hope you will find useful. Click Here
2. Daily Trend Barometer and Market Score
One of the things I’m really proud of, is the fact that I have managed to published the Trend Barometer and Market Score each day for more than a decade...as these tools are really good at describing the environment for trend following managers as well as giving insights into the general positioning of a trend following strategy! Click Here
3. Other Resources that can help you
And if you are hungry for more useful resources from the trend following world...check out some precious resources that I have found over the years to be really valuable. Click Here
Privacy Policy
Disclaimer
1 hr 2 min - BO02: The secret to successfully using Machine LearningToday I would like to share with you some life lessons and learnings from expert Robert Sinnott, where he shares his in depth knowledge of the modern evolution of systematic trading, in the form of Machine learning, and how machine learning has effected and impacted their short term and long term strategies. If you would like to hear the full episode then you can listen by clicking here. I’m pretty sure you are going to learn something valuable from what Robert shared with me.Rob: In statistics, in machine learning and decision theory, many of these concepts that are talked about actually got their start in the ‘70s, in the ‘60s, even in the ‘50s. Where a lot of the nuance has come today, or a lot of the excitement has come today, is in where and how they are applied, in what data sets they’re applied to, and to what degree you can automate and systematize the application of these tools.Machine learning is a toolbox. To say that we use machine learning to build our algorithms is kind of like saying, “I use tools to build a house.” It’s not really additive in terms of your understanding. So, let me break that down."Machine learning is a toolbox."Let’s talk about what actually we do with machine learning. Before we go into the tools that we use, which I think are really interesting, let me also break down to the problems that we try to solve because I think there’s a lot of hype about machine learning and I think that there are some kinds of problems where there is a lot of potential for growth.I think that there are some kinds of problems that, regardless of the amount of machinery that you throw at them, are still going to be a challenge and are still going to be a source of where people who are well versed in machines, and specifically their limitations, will be able to still add value as humans rather than just automatons.So when we think about machine learning, I would say that there are two kinds of problems. You have what you would think of as classification problems, or (as what I would like to call) stationary problems, meaning that the problem that you’re working on doesn’t change over time.Here’s a great example: Google has come out with a lot of really interesting results and a lot of really impressive, fast algorithms for identifying various things in videos and images. You go back ten years, and it was a really hard thing to identify a cat in a photo. Now it’s a really trivial thing. In fact, you can do that for arbitrary objects. You can just go online, and there are online classifiers that allow you to make these decisions.One of the very, very, early uses of these things was (in financial markets) things like counting cars in parking lots, or identifying cars in parking lots, or identifying the levels of oil in silos, or trying to predict crop yields, things like these. Those kinds of questions, where it doesn’t matter how many people are looking at the field to identify if this is going to be a good forecast or a bad forecast, or is it going to be a high yield crop or a low yield crop? That doesn’t change the success of detection of that yield.It doesn’t matter how many people are looking at whether or not that’s a cat in the video or a cat in the image. That doesn’t change your success rate. That’s a static problem and the more data you can throw at it, the more training samples that you can throw at the problem, the better your algorithm will be up to some asymptotic.What are the challenges there? Well, the challenges there are an abundance of features. The more things that you potentially know about a data set the harder is to glean what’s true. Also noise, the more noisy a data set, the more pixilated an image, for example, the harder it’s going to be to get your answer. But again, the more data that you have, the more training samples that you have,13 min
- Best of TTU – Machine LearningToday I would like to share with you some life lessons and learnings from expert Robert Sinnott, where he shares his in depth knowledge of the modern evolution of systematic trading, in the form of Machine learning, and how machine learning has effected and impacted their short term and long term strategies. If you would like to hear the full episode then you can listen by clicking here. I’m pretty sure you are going to learn something valuable from what Robert shared with me.Rob: In statistics, in machine learning and decision theory, many of these concepts that are talked about actually got their start in the ‘70s, in the ‘60s, even in the ‘50s. Where a lot of the nuance has come today, or a lot of the excitement has come today, is in where and how they are applied, in what data sets they’re applied to, and to what degree you can automate and systematize the application of these tools.Machine learning is a toolbox. To say that we use machine learning to build our algorithms is kind of like saying, “I use tools to build a house.” It’s not really additive in terms of your understanding. So, let me break that down."Machine learning is a toolbox."Let’s talk about what actually we do with machine learning. Before we go into the tools that we use, which I think are really interesting, let me also break down to the problems that we try to solve because I think there’s a lot of hype about machine learning and I think that there are some kinds of problems where there is a lot of potential for growth.I think that there are some kinds of problems that, regardless of the amount of machinery that you throw at them, are still going to be a challenge and are still going to be a source of where people who are well versed in machines, and specifically their limitations, will be able to still add value as humans rather than just automatons.So when we think about machine learning, I would say that there are two kinds of problems. You have what you would think of as classification problems, or (as what I would like to call) stationary problems, meaning that the problem that you’re working on doesn’t change over time.Here’s a great example: Google has come out with a lot of really interesting results and a lot of really impressive, fast algorithms for identifying various things in videos and images. You go back ten years, and it was a really hard thing to identify a cat in a photo. Now it’s a really trivial thing. In fact, you can do that for arbitrary objects. You can just go online, and there are online classifiers that allow you to make these decisions.One of the very, very, early uses of these things was (in financial markets) things like counting cars in parking lots, or identifying cars in parking lots, or identifying the levels of oil in silos, or trying to predict crop yields, things like these. Those kinds of questions, where it doesn’t matter how many people are looking at the field to identify if this is going to be a good forecast or a bad forecast, or is it going to be a high yield crop or a low yield crop? That doesn’t change the success of detection of that yield.It doesn’t matter how many people are looking at whether or not that’s a cat in the video or a cat in the image. That doesn’t change your success rate. That’s a static problem and the more data you can throw at it, the more training samples that you can throw at the problem, the better your algorithm will be up to some asymptotic.What are the challenges there? Well, the challenges there are an abundance of features. The more things that you potentially know about a data set the harder is to glean what’s true. Also noise, the more noisy a data set, the more pixilated an image, for example, the harder it’s going to be to get your answer. But again, the more data that you have, the more training samples that you have,13 min
- BO02: The secret to successfully using Machine Learning
Today I would like to share with you some life lessons and learnings from expert Robert Sinnott, where he shares his in depth knowledge of the modern evolution of systematic trading, in the form of Machine learning, and how machine learning has effected and impacted their short term and long term strategies. If you would like to hear the full episode then you can listen by clicking here. I’m pretty sure you are going to learn something valuable from what Robert shared with me.
Listen to the full episode here.
-----
50 YEARS OF TREND FOLLOWING BOOK AND BEHIND-THE-SCENES VIDEO FOR ACCREDITED INVESTORS - CLICK HERE
-----
Follow Niels on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube or via the TTU website.
IT’s TRUE ? – most CIO’s read 50+ books each year – get your FREE copy of the Ultimate Guide to the Best Investment Books ever written here.
And you can get a free copy of my latest book “Ten Reasons to Add Trend Following to Your Portfolio” here.
Learn more about the Trend Barometer here.
Send your questions to [email protected]
And please share this episode with a like-minded friend and leave an honest Rating & Review on iTunes or Spotify so more people can discover the podcast.
Copyright © 2025 – CMC AG – All Rights Reserved
----
PLUS: Whenever you're ready... here are 3 ways I can help you in your investment Journey:
1. eBooks that cover key topics that you need to know about
In my eBooks, I put together some key discoveries and things I have learnt during the more than 3 decades I have worked in the Trend Following industry, which I hope you will find useful. Click Here
2. Daily Trend Barometer and Market Score
One of the things I’m really proud of, is the fact that I have managed to published the Trend Barometer and Market Score each day for more than a decade...as these tools are really good at describing the environment for trend following managers as well as giving insights into the general positioning of a trend following strategy! Click Here
3. Other Resources that can help you
And if you are hungry for more useful resources from the trend following world...check out some precious resources that I have found over the years to be really valuable. Click Here
Privacy Policy
Disclaimer
13 min
About Top Traders Unplugged
From the publisher's feed
Top Traders Unplugged is where the world’s best investors come to share how they think - not just what they trade.
Hosted by Niels Kaastrup-Larsen, the show goes deep into systematic trend following, global macro, and the principles that drive long-term success.
No forecasts. No fads. Just real conversations with hedge fund managers, economists, authors, and allocators - revealing the timeless ideas, mental models, and risk frameworks behind robust performance.
If you're building resilient portfolios, allocating capital, or simply looking to cut through the noise - this is your edge.
Clear thinking. Deep insights. Real experience.
🎧 New episodes weekly. Explore all episodes at toptradersunplugged.com https://toptradersunplugged.com
Best of Top Traders Unplugged
Ranked by our users in the last 21 days
More shows like Top Traders Unplugged
Chat With Traders
1,983 Listeners
Macro Voices
3,056 Listeners
The Meb Faber Show - Better Investing
949 Listeners
Hidden Forces
1,450 Listeners
Flirting with Models
229 Listeners
Alpha Exchange
81 Listeners
The Market Huddle
358 Listeners
Excess Returns
85 Listeners
Macro Hive Conversations With Bilal Hafeez
98 Listeners
The Grant Williams Podcast
1,339 Listeners
Forward Guidance
265 Listeners
The Macro Trading Floor
219 Listeners
Thoughtful Money with Adam Taggart
411 Listeners
The Julia La Roche Show
87 Listeners
Monetary Matters with Jack Farley
148 Listeners