Way of the turtle

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Way of the Turtle

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our customers were doctors and dentists. At the time, I believed
that doctors and dentists were attracted to trading because they had
good incomes and could afford to risk money in futures markets.
Looking back on it, I can see that was only a partial answer. I now
believe that the real reason doctors and dentists are drawn in dis-
proportionate numbers to commodities trading is that they have a
lot of confidence in their intelligence and ability to translate their
success in their work to success in another industry—perhaps too
much confidence in this particular instance.
A doctor, for example, is invariably quite smart. You can’t
become a doctor without attending a good university, passing diffi-
cult tests, and getting good grades. Further, anyone who has grad-
uated from medical school has achieved a level of success that
many aspire to but only a few attain. It must be quite natural for
someone who is smart and has been successful in his first endeav-
ors to believe that he can be successful at trading as well.
At the same time, many doctors and dentists expect to be suc-
cessful traders immediately. Trading appears to be so simple that
they believe that this should be possible. However, I found that a
large percentage of them were not successful as traders because
they did not have realistic expectations. Success in one sphere of
business does not guarantee success in trading.
They did not realize that although trading is simple for the reasons
I outlined in the early part of the book, it is not easy. It takes a lot of
time and study before one realizes just how simple trading is, but it
takes many years of failure before most traders come to grips with how
hard it can be to keep things simple and not lose sight of the basics.
Consider the Turtles. We were taught the same methods and
taught in only two weeks, yet some of us did not make any money
Risk and Money Management
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at all. There was lots of positive reinforcement to do the right thing
since we could hear the other Turtles phoning in orders, yet some
of us did not follow the methods we were taught.