Turtle Trading Rules: The 1983 Experiment, Tested in 2026

The short version. The Turtle trading experiment is the most famous story in trend following: in 1983 Richard Dennis picked 13 people through newspaper ads, trained them for two weeks, and gave them real money. According to the original rules document, they averaged about 80% a year for four years. I coded every one of those rules and ran them on Exness tick data, 26 markets, January 2020 to September 2026. A $100,000 account ended at $42,299 (−57.7%), with a 75.6% drawdown on the way.

This is part 1 of 5. It covers the experiment itself and how I'm testing it. The rules, the code, the full results and the lessons each get their own post.

What was the Turtle trading experiment?

It started as an argument between two partners. Richard Dennis was a well-known commodity trader in Chicago. His partner, William Eckhardt, traded alongside him. Dennis thought trading could be taught like any other skill. Eckhardt thought good traders were born with something you couldn't hand to anyone else.

In mid-1983 they made a bet to settle it.

How were the Turtles chosen?

Dennis ran ads in Barron's, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. More than 1,000 people applied. About 80 were interviewed, 10 were selected, and Dennis added 3 people he already knew, which made 13 trainees in the first class. A second class followed in 1984. Sources disagree on the total, but it's usually put at around 23.

The training lasted two weeks, at the end of December 1983. In January 1984 the trainees traded small accounts. From February, most of them were trading between $500,000 and $2 million of Dennis's money.

The name came from Dennis himself. He'd just been to Asia and, as the Wall Street Journal reported in 1989, said they were going to grow traders the way Singapore grows turtles on farms.

How much did the Turtles make?

The original rules document says the group averaged about 80% a year, compounded, over four years. I can't verify that number. It comes from the people who were there, and I haven't found an audited track record for the group. I'm quoting it because it's the claim the legend rests on, not because I've checked it.

What I can say is that the rules themselves are fully specified, which is rare for a trading legend. You don't have to guess what they did. And that's what makes the story testable.

Why were the rules secret until 2003?

The Turtles signed an agreement to keep the rules confidential for ten years, which ran out at the end of 1993. After that, versions of the rules started appearing for sale. In 2003, a group of former Turtles put the complete rules online for free as "The Original Turtle Trading Rules" (OriginalTurtles.org), a 34-page PDF. That document is my source for everything in this series. Where other write-ups disagree with it, I follow the PDF.

Dennis is often quoted as saying he could publish his rules in the newspaper and no one would follow them, because the hard part is discipline, not knowledge. So I took him at his word and followed every rule, exactly as written.

Do the original Turtle rules still work?

Not on the data I tested. Here's the headline result, original rules with no parameter changes:

Basket	Markets	Period	Positions	End equity	Return	Max drawdown	Profit factor
11 markets	forex, gold, S&P 500, bitcoin	Jan 2020 – Sep 2026	834	$62,136	−37.9%	58.3%	0.89
26 markets	+ oil, gas, silver, platinum, copper, 6 stock indices	Jan 2020 – Sep 2026	1,232	$42,299	−57.7%	75.6%	0.83

Both baskets start with $100,000 and risk 1% of equity per unit, as the rules say. Profit factor is per position (all units of one trade together), and drawdown is measured on daily equity.

Adding markets made it worse, not better. And the split by direction is the most interesting part: on 26 markets, long trades made about $28,279 while short trades lost about $85,989. Part 4 goes through that in detail, including why I'm not simply dropping the shorts.

How I'm testing the rules

This isn't a spreadsheet of daily closes. Here's the setup, briefly:

• Data: Exness Raw Spread tick archive, turned into M1 and D1 bars. Real spreads from the archive. Commission at Exness Raw Spread rates on forex, gold and bitcoin; on the newer commodity and index markets I haven't confirmed it, so it's set to zero.
• Period: January 2020 to September 2026, about 6.7 years.
• Signals: Donchian breakouts on completed daily bars, exactly as in the original rules (System 1 at 20 days with its filter and the 55-day failsafe, System 2 at 55 days).
• Fills: checked minute by minute, so a day that touches both an entry and a stop is handled in the order it actually happened.
• Portfolio: one shared account across all markets, with the unit limits (4 per market, 6 for closely related markets, 10 for loosely related ones, 12 per direction) and the drawdown rule that trades a smaller account after a 10% loss.
• Checks: tests built from the worked examples in the PDF, a look-ahead check that cuts the data at three dates, and a second, independent version on daily bars that matched trade for trade on three markets.

I didn't optimise anything. The point is to test the rules as published, not to find settings that would have worked on this particular stretch of history.

What this series covers

1. The 1983 experiment (this post)
2. The full rules: N, unit sizing, both entry systems, pyramiding, stops, exits, portfolio limits, and why I didn't move to faster timeframes
3. Building the simulator, and the three checks that tell me the losses aren't a coding bug
4. The results: 11 markets, then 26, one rule switched off at a time, and the long-short split
5. What I learned, and the limits of this test

There's also a 7-minute video version on YouTube, with the same numbers drawn from the same data.

What I can't verify

• The 80% a year. It's the rules document's own claim about its authors. I haven't seen an audited record.
• The history. Numbers like 1,000 applicants or 23 Turtles in total come from the PDF and from later interviews and books. Sources disagree on some of them.
• Swap and some commissions. I've measured swap on 3 of the 26 markets. On the rest it's set to zero, and so is commission on the commodity and index markets. Trend trades are held for weeks, so the real results would likely be a bit worse than the table above.
• Earlier decades. My data starts in 2020. Six and a half years is a short window for a trend system, and I'm not claiming anything about the 1980s or the 2000s.

If you're interested in how another classic trend tool held up on the same data, I ran the TradingView SuperTrend strategy on 6.7 years of Exness ticks as well.

Bottom line: the Turtle experiment may well have worked in the 1980s, but the published rules lost 57.7% on 26 Exness markets from 2020 to 2026. Part 2 goes through those rules one by one.

Research, not financial advice. Past results do not predict future results.