Date
High
Low
Close
True Range
N
11/12/2002
0.6795
0.6720
0.6744
0.0085
0.0134
11/13/2002
0.6760
0.6550
0.6616
0.0210
0.0138
11/14/2002
0.6650
0.6585
0.6627
0.0065
0.0134
11/15/2002
0.6701
0.6620
0.6701
0.0081
0.0131
11/18/2002
0.6965
0.6750
0.6965
0.0264
0.0138
11/19/2002
0.7065
0.6944
0.6944
0.0121
0.0137
11/20/2002
0.7115
0.6944
0.7087
0.0171
0.0139
11/21/2002
0.7168
0.7100
0.7124
0.0081
0.0136
11/22/2002
0.7265
0.7120
0.7265
0.0145
0.0136
11/25/2002
0.7265
0.7098
0.7098
0.0167
0.0138
11/26/2002
0.7184
0.7110
0.7184
0.0086
0.0135
11/27/2002
0.7280
0.7200
0.7228
0.0096
0.0133
12/2/2002
0.7375
0.7227
0.7359
0.0148
0.0134
12/3/2002
0.7447
0.7310
0.7389
0.0137
0.0134
12/4/2002
0.7420
0.7140
0.7162
0.0280
0.0141
The unit size for December 6, 2002, using the
N value of 0.0141
from December 4, is as follows:
Heating oil:
N
0.0141
Account size
$1,000,000
Dollars
per point
42,000 (42,000-gallon contracts with price
quoted in dollars)
Unit size
0.01
$1,000,000 16.88
0.0141
42,000
254
•
Way of the Turtle
Since it is not possible to trade partial contracts, this would be
truncated to an even 16 contracts.
You might ask: “How often is it necessary
to compute the values
for
N and the unit size?” The Turtles were provided with a unit size
sheet on Monday of each week that listed
N and the unit size in
contracts for each of the futures that we traded.
The Importance of Position Sizing
Diversification is an attempt to spread
risk across many instruments
and increase the opportunity for profit by increasing the opportu-
nities to catch successful trades. To diversify properly requires mak-
ing similar if not identical bets on many different instruments.
The Turtle System used market volatility to measure the risk
involved in each market. We then used that risk measurement to
build positions in increments that represented
a constant amount of
risk (or volatility). That enhanced the benefits of diversification and
increased the likelihood that winning trades would offset losing trades.
Note that this diversification is much harder to achieve when
one is using insufficient trading capital. Consider the above exam-
ple if a $100,000 account had been used. The unit size would have
been a single contract, since 1.688 truncates to 1.
For smaller
accounts, the granularity of the adjustment is too large, and this
greatly reduces the effectiveness of diversification.
Units as a Measure of Risk
Since the Turtles used the unit as the base measure for position size
and since those units were
adjusted for volatility risk, the unit was
a measure of the risk both of a position and of the entire portfolio
of positions.
Original Turtle Trading Rules
•
255
The Turtles were given risk management rules that limited the
number of units that we could maintain at any specific
time on four
different levels. In essence, those rules controlled the total risk that a
trader could carry, and those limits minimized losses during prolonged
losing periods as well as during extraordinary price movements.
An example of an extraordinary
price movement was the day
after the October 1987 stock market crash. The U.S. Federal
Reserve lowered interest rates by several percentage points
overnight to boost the confidence of the stock market and the coun-
try. The Turtles were loaded short in interest-rate futures: eurodol-
lars, T-bills, and bonds. The losses the next day were enormous. In
most cases, 40 to 60 percent of account
equity was lost in a single
day. However, those losses would have been correspondingly higher
without the maximum position limits.
The limits were as follows:
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