Curtis Faith: The 19-Year-Old Turtle Who Made $30M+ in Four Years

Curtis Faith was the youngest and most successful of the Turtle Traders — 19 years old when Richard Dennis and William Eckhardt selected him for the famous 1983 experiment, and the top earner of the cohort with reported profits exceeding $30 million in just over four years. His 2007 book Way of the Turtle remains the definitive insider account of the experiment, written by the person who traded the largest account in the cohort.

Curtis M. Faith Most successful Turtle (1983-88) · Author, Way of the Turtle (2007) · Trading systems researcher Photo: Amazon (book jacket)

The Snapshot

Curtis M. Faith is the most successful and best-documented of the original Turtle Traders — the group of 13 novice traders Richard Dennis and William Eckhardt selected and trained in late 1983 to settle their famous bet about whether trading excellence was teachable. At 19 years old, Faith was the youngest member of the original cohort by a significant margin (most of the other Turtles were in their late 20s or 30s) and was given the largest trading account by Dennis. Over the subsequent four-plus years, he generated reported profits exceeding $30 million on the account he traded — the highest documented profit total of any individual Turtle and a meaningful share of the experiment's cumulative $100-175 million in total profits. Amazon

The Turtle cohort produced an average annual return of approximately 80% across the five-year experimental period. Faith's individual returns exceeded this average — he was Dennis's most successful trainee by reported profit total — though the specific year-by-year breakdown of his individual returns isn't fully public. The structural reason Faith's account became disproportionately profitable: Dennis incrementally increased the position size limits on Faith's account based on early demonstrated discipline, which compounded into much larger absolute profits as the underlying methodology continued working through the 1984-88 period. Goodreads

For traders studying the Turtle experiment specifically, Faith's career is essential reading because he is the single best-positioned source on what actually happened inside the experiment. His 2007 book Way of the Turtle: The Secret Methods that Turned Ordinary People into Legendary Traders remains the definitive insider account — written 23 years after the experiment ended, with the benefit of professional distance and Faith's subsequent two decades of experience in trading systems research. The framework is part of our broader trading education canon. TraderLion

The Turtle Selection

Dennis and Eckhardt recruited Turtle candidates through classified advertisements placed in The Wall Street Journal, Barron's, and The New York Times in late 1983. The advertisements were deliberately brief and oblique: "Mr. Dennis and his associates will train a small group of applicants in his proprietary trading concepts. Successful candidates will then trade solely for Mr. Dennis." Over 1,000 applications were submitted; the selection process narrowed the candidate pool to roughly 80 finalists who were interviewed personally by Dennis and Eckhardt. The final 13 selections for the first Turtle class came from this group of finalists. Earn2Trade

Faith's selection was unusual on multiple dimensions. He was 19 years old — meaningfully younger than the other Turtles, most of whom were in their late 20s or 30s with at least some prior professional experience. He had limited formal financial background and was applying based on the same speculative interest in markets that motivated the broader Turtle applicant pool. The specific traits Dennis and Eckhardt were screening for — calculated risk-taking, emotional discipline, mathematical comfort, willingness to follow rules through drawdown — apparently produced a stronger match in Faith than in the older candidates, despite his age and inexperience. The selection demonstrated that the relevant traits were independent of professional background, which was part of what the broader experiment was designed to test. TurtleTrader.com

The Two-Week Training

The Turtle training was compressed into a two-week intensive program in late 1983, conducted in Chicago. Dennis and Eckhardt taught the trainees the rules-based trend-following system that the two partners had jointly designed — entry signals based on N-day price breakouts (the Donchian channel methodology), position sizing based on volatility (Average True Range as the volatility unit), pyramiding rules for adding to winning positions, and stop-loss methodology for exiting losers. The instructional emphasis was on mechanical execution rather than discretionary interpretation. QuantifiedStrategies

The most important pedagogical insight Dennis and Eckhardt emphasized — and the one Faith has repeatedly identified as the structural foundation of the methodology — was that rules-based execution beats discretionary judgment over extended periods. The Turtles were explicitly forbidden from second-guessing the system signals, from skipping trades based on subjective conviction, or from modifying position sizes based on recent performance. The discipline was the methodology; the underlying rules were almost incidental compared to the requirement to execute them consistently through drawdown. TraderLion

The $30M+ Trading Run

The Turtles began live trading in February 1984 with funded accounts from Dennis. Initial account sizes varied based on demonstrated training performance; Faith was given one of the larger accounts based on his discipline during training, and his account size was incrementally increased throughout the subsequent years based on continued strong execution. By the end of the experimental period in 1988, Faith was reportedly trading the largest single account in the Turtle cohort. Amazon

The cumulative profit Faith generated for Dennis across the 1984-88 period — reported at over $30 million — represented a meaningful share of the overall Turtle cohort's profits. The structural reason for Faith's disproportionate contribution: the methodology produced strong returns across multiple commodity markets during the 1984-88 period (which included several major trend-following bull moves in metals, currencies, and softs), and Faith's larger account base translated those returns into larger absolute dollar profits. His percentage returns were strong but not extraordinary relative to other top Turtles; his dollar profit total was disproportionate because of the account size advantage. TraderLion

The System He Executed

The system Faith executed during the Turtle period is now well-documented. The core elements: entry on N-day price breakouts (typically 20-day Donchian channels for the primary system and 55-day channels for the secondary system), position sizing using Average True Range as the volatility unit (typically risking 1-2% of account equity per position based on ATR), pyramiding rules for adding to winning positions when prices moved beyond half-ATR from the entry, and exit rules on opposite breakouts (10-day for the primary system, 20-day for the secondary). QuantifiedStrategies

The structural insight that distinguished Turtle execution from naive trend-following was the integration of three elements: rules-based entry signals, volatility-scaled position sizing, and disciplined exits. Most retail trend-followers focus on entry signals while underweighting position sizing and exit discipline; the Turtle methodology explicitly integrated all three with relatively rigid quantitative rules. The position sizing in particular was structurally important — sizing positions based on volatility rather than fixed dollar amounts meant that more volatile markets got smaller positions, which protected the system against the asymmetric blow-up risk of fixed-dollar sizing in high-volatility environments. Amazon

After the Experiment

Dennis terminated the Turtle program in 1988, partly because of significant losses in his own personal accounts during the 1987-88 period and partly because the experimental question had been definitively settled. Faith was 24 years old when the experiment ended, with substantial personal wealth from his Turtle-era performance fees and the kind of career-defining track record that would shape his subsequent professional life. Earn2Trade

Faith's post-Turtle career has been substantial but deliberately less public than other notable Turtle alumni. He moved into trading systems research and software development, eventually becoming head of research and development at Trading Blox, LLC — a company specializing in software for trading system analysis and development that has become one of the standard institutional platforms for systematic strategy backtesting. He also operates a trading-systems internet forum (tradingblox.com/forum) that has served as a discussion venue for systematic traders across multiple decades. The professional trajectory is the kind of structurally satisfying outcome most successful Turtle alumni achieved — substantial wealth from the experimental period combined with continued involvement in the systematic trading industry. Amazon

Way of the Turtle (2007)

Way of the Turtle: The Secret Methods that Turned Ordinary People into Legendary Traders was published by McGraw-Hill in 2007 — 23 years after the original Turtle training and approximately 19 years after the experimental period ended. The book is the most-detailed insider account of the Turtle experiment available, written by the most successful single participant in the program. The content combines first-person memoir (the selection process, the training, the day-to-day reality of executing the system through extended drawdown periods) with explicit documentation of the trading rules and the underlying methodological reasoning. Barnes & Noble

The book's structural contribution to the trading literature is that it ended the long-standing secrecy around the specific Turtle trading rules. Dennis and Eckhardt had originally required the Turtles to sign agreements maintaining confidentiality about the methodology — partly to protect proprietary edge, partly to manage the publicity around the experiment. By 2007, the agreements had expired and the underlying market structure had evolved enough that the original Turtle rules were no longer competitive in their original form. Faith's publication of the rules in Way of the Turtle was widely understood as the formal end of Turtle-era secrecy, and the book has become foundational reading for systematic traders studying the historical development of mechanical trend-following. TraderLion

What Traders Can Actually Learn From This

The first lesson from Faith's career is the structural value of disciplined rules execution over situational judgment. Faith was 19, had no professional trading background, and had no prior expertise in commodity markets — yet he generated $30 million+ in profits because he executed the Turtle methodology consistently through extended drawdown periods that older, more experienced traders found psychologically difficult to sustain. The lesson isn't that age and experience don't matter; it's that the discipline of mechanical execution can substitute for the analytical capability that experienced discretionary traders rely on. For retail traders, this is structurally important: the constraint is usually discipline, not analytical ability.

The second lesson is volatility-scaled position sizing. The Turtle methodology's structural innovation wasn't the trend-following signals (which had existed in various forms since at least the 1950s) — it was the systematic use of Average True Range as the position-sizing unit, which made positions automatically smaller in volatile markets and larger in calm markets. The framework protected the system against the asymmetric blow-up risk that destroys most retail traders who use fixed-dollar position sizing in high-volatility environments. The principle transfers cleanly to any time frame and any trading methodology: position size should scale inversely with volatility, not with conviction or recent performance.

The third lesson is about the trade-off between rules and discretion. Faith's success demonstrates that pure rules-based execution can outperform discretionary judgment in extended structural windows. But the Turtle methodology itself stopped working in its original form by the mid-1990s — Dennis personally lost substantial money in the late 1980s and early 1990s when the same trend-following signals that produced the Turtle returns became unreliable as markets adapted. The structural lesson: rules-based methodologies work until they stop working, which means even systematic traders need ongoing research to maintain edge. Our broader day trading coverage addresses related questions of methodology evolution.

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Disclosure: This article is editorial and contains no affiliate links. Trading involves substantial risk of loss. Curtis Faith's performance figures — including the reported $30 million+ in Turtle-era profits — are based on widely reported industry coverage and Faith's own Way of the Turtle book disclosures. The Turtle Traders program was a private experiment by Richard Dennis and the specific trading records have not all been externally audited in the modern sense. Individual results vary substantially; the Turtle outcomes are not representative of typical systematic trading results at any scale, and the original Turtle rules are no longer competitive in their original form due to subsequent market adaptation.