Way of the turtle

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THINK LIKE A TURTLE 
Good trading is not about being right, it is about trading right. 
If you want to be successful, you need to think of the long run 
and ignore the outcomes of individual trades.
A
fter witnessing the success of the Turtles, many traders and
investors have concluded that Richard Dennis won his bet
with Bill Eckhardt that trading can be taught. I don’t agree. I think
the bet was a draw.
What people do not know is that many Turtles, perhaps one-third
to one-half of them, were less profitable than the highest-performing
Turtles or were not successful at all. So, although most of the Tur-
tles learned from the experiences of that first month and over the
months that followed developed into winning traders, others were
dropped from the program with losing records. The difference
between the best- and the worst-performing Turtles came down to
their individual psychological makeup. Some took more readily to
the Turtle Way than did others, proving that although trading can be
taught to most people, some are better suited to it than others. 
An important aspect of understanding the winning trader is
understanding how his or her emotions affect trading. If you were
Copyright © 2007 by Curtis M. Faith. Click here for terms of use. 

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born with the right qualities, you will find it easier to learn how to
trade well; if you were not, you will need to develop those quali-
ties. That will be your primary task. What are the right qualities?
It’s Not about Who’s Right
Winning traders think in the present and avoid thinking too much
about the future. Beginners want to predict the future in their trad-
ing. When they win, they think it means they were right and they
feel like heroes. When they lose, they feel like scum. That is the
wrong approach.
Turtles do not care about being right. They care about making
money. Turtles do not pretend to be able to predict the future. They
never look at markets and say: “Gold is going up.” They look at the
future as unknowable in specifics but foreseeable in character. In
other words, it is impossible to know whether a market is going to
go up or down or whether a trend will stop now or in two months.
You do know that there will be trends and that the character of
price movement will not change because human emotion and cog-
nition will not change.
It turns out that it is much easier to make money when you are
wrong most of the time. If your trades are losers most of the time,
that shows that you are not trying to predict the future. For this rea-
son, you no longer care about the outcome of any particular trade
since you expect that trade to lose money. When you expect a trade
to lose money, you also realize that the outcome of a particular
trade does not indicate anything about your intelligence. Simply
put, to win you need to free yourself and your thinking of outcome
bias. It does not matter what happens with any particular trade. If