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Have you seen the film Trading Places? It’s one of my favourite films. Complete nonsense of course, or is it?
There are a few things about the film that are very worth noting.
The first is that it is based (very loosely) on a true event and secondly the impact a piece of news can have on the market.
Remember the penultimate scene in the film where the orange juice futures news is released?
Randolph and Mortimer are very smug before the release because they believe that they already know what the report will say, but of course they are wrong. They have risked their entire fortune on the outcome, which they lose. If only they had been able to have a stop-loss order in place, things would have been very different for them.
It still makes me laugh when the market closes and they plead, “Turn the machines back on, we want our money back".
Whenever I take a loss (and yes I do always have a stop-loss order in place), I always call out “turn the machines back on. I want my money back".
But there is a serious side to all of this.
- When there is a fiscal report being released, the market price can be very volatile and unpredictable, both immediately before and after the release.
- No matter what the pundits might say, no one really knows how the market will move once the release happens.
- Unless you are a specialist at trading news releases, stay out of the market for at least 30 minutes before and after the release.
I said that the film Trading Places was based on a real event. The event was an experiment known as the Turtle Trading Experiment.
This is how the experiment came about, and there is a great lesson to be learned from it.
During 1983 commodities trader Richard Dennis was having a dispute with his friend and fellow trader Bill Eckhardt about whether great traders were born or made. Richard believed that he could teach people to become great traders. Bill thought that genetics was the determining factor.
In order to settle the matter, Richard suggested that they recruit and train some traders and give them actual accounts to trade to see which one of them was correct.
They took out advertising positions for trading apprentices in Barron’s, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. The ad stated that after a brief training session, the trainees would be supplied with an account to trade.
The applicants, and there were many, were short listed down to 10. This group finally became 13 after Richard added three people he already knew to the group. They were invited to Chicago and trained for two weeks. After training they began trading small accounts until they could prove their ability to trade. After this, Richard funded most of the trainees with a $1 million trading account
The students were called the Turtles. Mr. Dennis, had just returned from Asia when he started the program, he described it to someone by saying, “We are going to grow traders just like they grow turtles in Singapore".
The Turtles became one of the most famous experiments in trading history because over the next four years, the successful Turtles earned an average annual compound rate of return of over 80%.
And yet despite all of the Turtles receiving the same basic start, and all of them using EXACTLY the same system, NOT ALL of them were successful at trading.
Why is this?
The answer is quite simply human nature. The Turtles that were successful were the ones who stuck rigidly to the trading system. They did not question the system and they did not change it. Those Turtles who rigidly adhered to the system are now extremely wealthy.
So the lesson here is this.
If you have a fantastic trading system, such as THE AMAZING STEALTH FOREX SYSTEM, don’t change anything. Trade the system in strict accordance with the rules. All of us traders have to learn to hold our emotions and “hunches" in check because we are after all, human. But if we fail to follow the system we may well be crying “Turn the machines back on, we want our money back". |
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