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Trading Strategies

What Is Turtle Trading

Turtle trading is a written system from 1983: it watches for a price above the highest high of twenty days, stops watching at the first low below the lowest low of ten days, and sets the size of every position from N, the average daily range. This paper shows you gold's 28 August 2025 crossing of the twenty-day line from real bars; the turtle and the card the name comes from; the two lines on the daily chart, from the crossing to the day the ten-day line was crossed forty-two days later; the unit N sets, in example figures; the same cue in July, over in five days; and N read off the ATR window on your platform.

Difficulty
Intermediate
Reading time
6 min
Pages
9
Reviewed by
Saman Rahbar

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The twenty-day line

Turtle trading is a written system, and its first line is a breakout: a price above the highest high of the last twenty days. Take gold in August 2025. Through the middle of the month the highest high of the twenty days before sat at 3408.98, the high of 8 August, and no day went above it. On 28 August the day's high reached 3423.12, above the line for the first time in twenty days. That crossing, and nothing more, is the cue the system was built on. The rest of the system is what it does about the crossing, and all of it was written down before the class that used it had seen a chart.

The turtle and the card

The name is a bet. In 1983 the Chicago trader Richard Dennis bet his partner William Eckhardt that trading could be taught from a set of written rules to people who had never traded, and said he would grow traders the way turtle farms in Singapore grew turtles. He advertised, trained a class for two weeks, and gave them money to trade the card. The card is the system. A breakout of a twenty-day high or low to open. A breakout of a ten-day low or high the other way to close. And a size for every position set by a number called N, which is how far the market moves in a day.

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