Hmmmm...There are 25 people who are $5000 poorer out there. Wah
lau. One seminar cost 4888 dollars!!!
Turtle trading. Haha. Sounds comical.
extracted from the straits
times.
SEPT 1, 2003
Psst...25 investors now know 'turtle trading' secrets
They fork out nearly $5,000 each to attend seminar on lucrative
tradingstrategies in global financial markets
By Azhar Khalid
MARKETS CORRESPONDENT
TO SOME it may sound like a dubious get-rich-quick scheme, but for
others, the cloak of mystery that has surrounded an investing
technique called 'turtle trading' for the past 20 years is quite
enticing.
Talk of multi-million-dollar profits is a key factor, too.
So much so that over the weekend, 25 Singaporeans paid $4,888 per
person to attend a seminar that allowed them to be inducted into
the reportedly lucrative secrets of turtle trading.
When the system was first devised in the United States in 1983, a
group of 14 'turtles' was sworn to secrecy for 10 years. Many were
said to have become millionaires. Now the so-called secrets are
more widely available - at a price.
And although its founder US futures trader Richard Dennis is from
the US, he is said to have coined the term 'turtle trading' right
here in Singapore.
That is according to one of Mr Dennis' acolytes, Mr Russell Sands,
one of the original 'turtles', who conducted the Singapore seminar
at the Inter-Continental Hotel.
Mr Dennis apparently got the inspiration from a visit he made to a
turtle farm in Singapore in the early 1980s.
'At the turtle farm, he saw how some of the baby turtles were
crushed at the bottom of the pond by the stronger ones,' Mr Sands
said.
'So when he got back to Chicago, he told his partner that he wanted
to grow traders in Chicago like they grow turtles in Singapore, and
teach them to become strong traders and survive,' he added.
Mr Sands claimed that the turtle traders chalked up combined
profits of US$180 million (S$318 million) last year alone from
dabbling in the futures, bonds and stock markets globally, although
the figure cannot be verified.
Quite clearly, Mr Sands was not about to disclose the 'secrets' of
turtle trading to The Straits Times, but he offered a broad-brush
description of the technique.
He said turtle trading is a strategy used to invest in financial
markets including futures, equities, bonds and currency
markets.
It uses a combination of technical analysis which looks at trends
in price charts, a money management component as well as selective
courses in psychology.
Mr Dennis developed that strategy because he believed that good
trading skills could be taught and it was neither some intuitive
exercise nor was it a 'gifted' skill endowed to a select few.
The money management part of the strategy helps traders know how
much to buy and sell when they can identify an emerging trend, how
big a position to take, when to get into a trade and when to cut
losses and square off their positions.
Trading discipline is a key factor to ensure success using the
turtle strategy, he said.
Another key part of turtle trading is psychology. 'Some people are
afraid to take a loss because of ego', he said, and the strategy
helps overcome these kinds of human foibles.
'Some people have studied the market a lot and they think they are
smarter than the markets so they get emotional,' he said.
Despite its mysteries, turtle trading is somewhat modest in its
claimed success rate.
'With turtle trading we don't tell investors that they will win all
the time but we tell them they can win 30 per cent of the time and
make a lot of money, and when they lose 70 per cent of the time
they will lose little,' he said.
'What it teaches you is to follow the market along and not try to
predict it or try to outguess it,' he said.
'I don't think I am smart enough to know where the market is
heading but what we tell the turtles is to follow the market
along,' said Mr Sands, who holds an MBA from New York
University.
Copyright @ 2003 Singapore Press Holdings. All rights
reserved.