Linda Raschke: The Floor Trader Who Wrote the Book on Short-Term Setups

Linda Bradford Raschke has been a full-time professional trader since 1981 — floor trader on the Pacific and Philadelphia exchanges, registered Commodity Trading Advisor, hedge fund manager with a Barclay top-1% ranking, and the first woman Jack Schwager ever interviewed for the Market Wizards series. The Street Smarts book she co-authored in 1996 has been on serious futures-trader bookshelves ever since.

Linda Bradford Raschke Professional trader since 1981 · Founder, LBRGroup · Author, Street Smarts & Trading Sardines Photo: lindaraschke.net

The Snapshot

Linda Bradford Raschke is the kind of trader whose name appears in every honest list of great American traders and somehow still doesn't get the attention she deserves. Forty-plus years as a professional, starting in 1981 — floor trader on two exchanges, registered CTA since 1992, founder of LBRGroup, hedge fund manager whose 5-year trailing performance ranked in the top 1% of funds with over $100 million AUM per Barclay's database, author of one of the most-cited short-term futures trading books in print, and the first woman Jack Schwager interviewed for his Market Wizards series. She retired from institutional roles in 2015 but continues to trade her own account, lecture, and publish. MoneyShow

For day traders, Raschke occupies an unusual position. Her trading time frame is short — usually intraday to a few days — but her execution context is futures rather than equities, and her style descends from the Wyckoff school of price-and-volume tape reading rather than the chart-pattern lineage that defines most retail equity traders. She's covered in our broader retail trader survey because the techniques she teaches in Street Smarts — the 80-20 bar, Turtle Soup, anti-climactic reversals — transfer cleanly into equity day trading regardless of instrument, and because no honest survey of great traders should skip her. Quantified Strategies

Pasadena to the Pacific Exchange

Linda Sue Bradford was born in 1959 in Pasadena, California. Her father was a trader — but not, by her own accounts, a particularly successful one — and her childhood involved helping him manually scan stock charts for patterns. The early exposure produced two things: a comfort with chart structure most retail traders never develop, and a clear-eyed view that the market does not automatically reward people who are interested in it. She attended Occidental College, graduated, and started working in finance in 1981 trading on the floor of the Pacific Coast Stock Exchange. Wikipedia

The transition to the Pacific Exchange wasn't planned. In her early twenties, Raschke spent time hanging around the exchange floor before having any formal trading ambitions, watching the action, talking to floor traders, and gradually building the kind of pattern recognition that only comes from being physically present at the point of execution. A trader at the exchange explained options pricing to her, and her reaction — by her own retelling — was that you didn't need to be a rocket scientist to do this. She got her membership shortly after. TurtleTrader

The Floor Trader Years

Raschke spent her early career as a market maker in equity options on the Pacific Coast Stock Exchange and later the Philadelphia Stock Exchange. Floor trading in the 1980s was a meaningfully different profession than screen-based trading is today — execution was physical, communication was hand signals and shouting, and the trader was operationally responsible for providing two-sided markets in their assigned options series. The role taught a specific kind of discipline that doesn't transfer cleanly to retail screen trading: how to manage inventory risk continuously, how to read order flow in real time from sounds and physical signals, and how to maintain composure when the market was moving fast against you. MoneyShow

The First Woman in Market Wizards

In 1992, Jack Schwager published The New Market Wizards — the second volume in his canonical interview series — and included Linda Raschke as one of his featured subjects. She was the first woman Schwager profiled across the entire Wizards series, which then ran to four volumes. The Wizards interview is the closest thing to a primary source for understanding Raschke's trading philosophy in her own words at the height of her floor-trading career, and it became a foundational reference text for serious short-term traders the same way the Tudor Jones interview from the original Market Wizards did for macro traders. Wikipedia

One thing the Wizards interview captured well was Raschke's emphasis on preparation. Her trading day, by her own description, starts the night before — reviewing charts, identifying setups, building a watchlist, and forming a thesis for how the next session is likely to develop. The actual trading hours are then primarily about execution against the prepared thesis rather than discretionary in-the-moment analysis. The framing — "the homework is done before the market opens; the day is just execution" — has been borrowed by essentially every serious short-term trading curriculum since. Quantified Strategies

Founding LBRGroup

In 1992 — the same year as the Wizards publication — Raschke registered as a Commodity Trading Advisor with the National Futures Association and founded LBRGroup, Inc., the vehicle through which she would manage outside capital for the next two decades. The transition from floor trader to CTA isn't automatic; the skills overlap but the operational requirements (reporting, compliance, client communication, performance documentation) are substantially different. Raschke handled the transition by leaning heavily on the floor-trader discipline she'd already built — meticulous record-keeping, daily preparation rituals, and an emphasis on capital preservation. Wyckoff Stock Market Institute

The fund she launched in 2002 was ranked by Barclay's at the 17th-best 5-year trailing performance out of 4,500 hedge funds — placing it firmly in the top 1% by that metric. She ran successful CTA programs, served as principal trader for several hedge funds, and ran commercial hedging programs for clients before retiring from institutional roles as a CTA and Commodity Pool Operator in 2015. Since then, she has continued to trade her own account, primarily in futures and options, while focusing more of her time on lecturing and educational work. Options Trading IQ

The E-mini S&P Specialty

The instrument Raschke is most associated with is the E-mini S&P 500 futures contract, which has been her primary trading vehicle for decades. Approximately 95% of LBRGroup's trading was historically concentrated in the E-mini S&P, with the remaining 5% in options. The choice of instrument reflects deliberate trade-offs: futures offer significant leverage compared to cash equity trading, the E-mini S&P has extraordinary liquidity (Raschke has noted she can buy or sell 600 contracts with minimal slippage), and the contract gives non-correlated diversification when paired with other futures products. Traders Magazine

The Top-Down Context Framework

Raschke's day starts with a top-down chart review across multiple time frames — weekly, daily, hourly — to establish what kind of day is statistically likely. Is the broader trend favorable for fading intraday range tests, or for pressing momentum on trend days? Is upcoming economic news likely to compress or expand volatility? She's been explicit that the context-setting work is more important than the specific trade triggers, because the same setup carries different expected value in different regimes. On light-volume days awaiting major announcements (FOMC, monthly economic releases), she leans toward fading range tests. On high-volume, high-volatility trend days, she presses positions and rides them into the close. Macro Ops

Street Smarts and the Turtle Soup Trade

In 1996, Raschke co-authored Street Smarts: High Probability Short-Term Trading Strategies with Laurence Connors. The book contained dozens of short-term trading setups, presented with the kind of mechanical clarity that distinguishes serious technical work from the typical "patterns might work" trading book. Street Smarts has been on the recommended reading list of essentially every serious short-term futures trading curriculum for nearly thirty years. TurtleTrader

The single most influential setup from the book is the one called Turtle Soup. The name is the joke. Richard Dennis's Turtle traders famously traded a long-term trend-following system built on 20-day and 55-day breakouts — buy a new 20-day high, sell a new low, ride the trend. The logic works, but it has a structural vulnerability: breakouts fail. Markets make new highs or lows, trigger trend-following entries, and then reverse. The Turtles paid that "false breakout tax" routinely as the cost of capturing the rare genuine trends. Raschke's Turtle Soup setup turns the failure mode into the entry signal — when a 20-day breakout fails (price reverses back into the prior range within a defined number of bars), enter in the opposite direction. The setup essentially monetizes the false breakouts that trend-followers can't avoid. TurtleTrader

In 2018, Raschke published a memoir titled Trading Sardines: Lessons in the Markets from a Lifelong Trader, which blends personal anecdotes from her decades on the floor and in CTA management with broader market reflections. The book is less technical than Street Smarts and is generally regarded as one of the more readable trader memoirs in print. Macro Ops

The Lecturing and Education Legacy

Beyond her own trading, Raschke has been one of the more prolific educators in the futures trading world. She has lectured in over 30 countries, served on the Board of Directors for the Market Technicians Association, and served as President of the American Association of Professional Technical Analysts. Her published research has appeared across industry publications, and she's a recurring speaker at major trader conferences. The lecturing schedule isn't a sideline — it's part of how she has positioned herself in the industry post-CTA retirement, and it has substantially extended her influence beyond what her trading alone would have produced. Wyckoff Stock Market Institute

What Traders Can Actually Learn From This

The first lesson from Raschke's career is the value of preparation. Her trading day is structured so that the homework — chart review, setup identification, thesis formation — happens before the market opens, not during it. The actual trading hours are mostly execution against a prepared plan rather than discretionary in-the-moment decision-making. Most retail traders invert this ratio, spending the trading hours trying to figure out what's happening and the off-hours doing relatively unstructured "research." The Raschke ratio — heavy preparation, light in-session deliberation — is one of the most consistent traits across long-tenured professional traders. The technique is borrowable regardless of your specific strategy.

The second lesson is context-sensitivity. The same setup carries different expected value in different regimes. A breakout that's profitable in a high-volatility trend day is a fade target in a low-volatility consolidation. Raschke's daily preparation explicitly answers the question "what kind of day is this likely to be" before identifying specific trades, which lets her calibrate which setups to weight up and which to skip. Most retail traders never form an explicit daily regime hypothesis; they take whatever setups appear, and then wonder why their backtested win rate doesn't match their live results. Backtesting averages across regimes; live trading happens in a specific regime.

The third lesson is Turtle Soup itself. The setup is publicly available — it's in a book you can buy used for less than the cost of a single bad trade — and it's been profitable across decades and instruments. Most retail traders skip it because it's not glamorous, doesn't appear in trading-influencer YouTube, and requires the patience to wait for failed breakouts rather than chasing the breakouts everyone else is chasing. The setup's enduring usefulness is direct evidence that public, widely-known techniques can still work; the constraint isn't access to information, it's the discipline to execute the unglamorous version of it. For broader study of mechanical short-term setups, our trading education resources cover adjacent terrain.

Frequently Asked Questions

Disclosure: This article is editorial and contains no affiliate links. Trading involves substantial risk of loss. Raschke's audited CTA and hedge fund performance figures are from public Barclay's database rankings; specific year-by-year returns vary and her best results are not representative of typical trader outcomes.