In 1983, legendary Chicago trader Richard Dennis placed a small classified ad in the Wall Street Journal offering to train complete beginners as commodity traders. Over 1,000 people applied. Dennis selected just 23. Those 23 people, later known as the TurtleTraders, went on to generate over $100 million in profits using the trend following rules Dennis taught them in two weeks.

The TurtleTrader selection process is one of the most fascinating hiring stories in financial history. Dennis was not looking for Wall Street pedigree, Ivy League degrees, or prior trading experience. He was looking for something far rarer: people who could think in terms of odds, tolerate uncertainty, and follow rules without letting emotion interfere. What followed was a selection process unlike anything the trading world had seen before or since.

This page documents the full selection story, the backgrounds of the people Dennis chose, the original 63-question true/false test every applicant had to complete, and the essay questions that revealed how candidates thought about risk, failure, and money.

How Dennis Found His Students: The Stories Behind the Selection

What made the TurtleTrader selection process so unusual was that Dennis deliberately sought people outside the financial establishment. He wanted raw talent, unconventional thinking, and the psychological makeup to follow a system under pressure. The stories of how individual TurtleTraders came to be selected are a fascinating window into what Dennis was actually looking for.

People were willing to do just about anything to get Dennis’s attention. Of all the approaches his students took to get themselves admitted to his trading school, Jim Melnick’s was the most extreme and inventive. He was an overweight, working-class guy from Boston who was living over a saloon in the Chicago suburbs. However, Melnick was determined to get as close to Dennis as possible. He actually moved to Chicago just because he had heard about Richard Dennis.

He ended up as a security guard for the Chicago Board of Trade and every morning would say, “Good morning, Mr. Dennis” as Dennis entered the building. Then, boom, the ad came out and Melnick got selected. Dennis, who was loaded with millions and power, took a guy off the street and gave him the opportunity to start a new life. The story of Melnick is pure rags-to-riches. Another of Dennis’s students described Jim’s “everyman” qualities: “He reminded me of a truck driver and like magic became a ‘Turtle’ and he still couldn’t believe why or how.”

Mike Shannon, a former actor who had left school at the age of sixteen, made it to Dennis’s door too. He recalled, “I was working as a broker, and I was a very bad commodity broker.” Through a bunch of floor brokers Shannon found out about the ad, but he knew his résumé was problematic. He had a solution to that: “I made up a phony resume, and I sent it off to Richard Dennis. I used the school of audacity to get the job.” People get fired or, at the very least, do not get hired because of falsifying a résumé, but that was not how it worked with the eccentric head of C&D Commodities.

On the other hand, Jim DiMaria, a Notre Dame graduate and family man straight from the Ozzie and Harriet back lot, was already on the trading floor working for Dennis when he applied. DiMaria remembered that every now and again there would be a “1,000 lot” (jargon for a huge order of one thousand futures contracts) that would come through on the trading floor. Finally, he said, “Who is this client with the enormous orders?” He thought he had heard it was a rich dentist, which was plausible since doctors often dabbled in trading. Eventually he put two and two together, realising that Rich Dennis was the “rich dentist.”

Dennis, however, was not looking solely for doormen and floor traders. He went after the highly educated too. Michael Cavallo had a Harvard MBA. With a mop of brown hair and wire-rimmed glasses, he was a preppy corporate warrior working in Boston when he caught wind of the ad that would change his life. When he saw the ad, Cavallo had already heard of Dennis. He recalled, “I nearly fell out of my seat when I saw it. He was looking for starting shortstop. I couldn’t believe it. This is sort of a dream job for me. I immediately responded.”

Former U.S. Air Force pilot Erle Keefer’s path to Dennis was pure coincidence as well. He was sitting in a New York City sauna when he picked up a newspaper and spotted the Dennis ad. At that moment the female star of the movie Trading Places, Jamie Lee Curtis, was sitting in the same sauna with her boyfriend. Keefer was sitting there reading Barron’s: “I am looking at this ad and I knew who Rich was. I said, ‘Wow! This guy did it.'” Keefer thought there was little chance he would get accepted.

In the strictly man’s world of commodities trading in the early 1980s, women did apply. Liz Cheval, the diminutive and flamboyant Katie Couric look-alike, was one of them. She must have known that she would stand out from other applicants by being female. At the time she was actively considering a career in filmmaking, even though she was working for a brokerage firm as a day job. Cheval’s former boss, Bradley Rotter, knew the offer was a big deal: “Dennis had already been managing money for me, and I did very well. Liz came to me and said she was thinking about applying and asked whether or not she should do it and I said absolutely. It was an opportunity of a lifetime.”

Jeff Gordon, an attorney and small business owner at the time, just happened to be thumbing through the newspaper and saw the ad. Gordon, five foot eight, a slender man who could have been a former member of the Revenge of the Nerds cast, knew the opportunity could be huge: “Everybody wanted to be able to trade, to make money like Richard Dennis.” Firing off a résumé was a coincidental and fortuitous life-changing decision that Gordon made in a heartbeat.

Given Dennis’s eccentric personality, it was no shock that Jiri “George” Svoboda, an immigrant from then communist Czechoslovakia and a monster underdog in most people’s eyes, was selected. He was a master blackjack player beating Las Vegas like a drum long before Breaking Vegas and 1990’s famed M.I.T. blackjack team. Dennis also selected Tom Shanks.

TurtleTrader George Svoboda

Handsome, dark-haired, and smooth with the ladies, Shanks was working as a computer programmer for Hull Trading as his day job and beating Vegas at night with his blackjack skills. Shanks and Svoboda knew each other from the blackjack underground. When they bumped into each other in Chicago, Svoboda said to Shanks, “Hey, I’m here for an interview with Richard Dennis. Have you heard?” Shanks had no clue, but said, “You’ve got to get me an interview!” They both ended up getting hired that same afternoon. Erle Keefer knew about their wild backgrounds. He said, “George ran the Czech team, and Tom was essentially with the Dingo computer in a boot.” Shanks used to say, “I never want to see another Dingo boot in my life.” He had to learn how to take it apart to put the computer in and was mighty sick of boots after a while.

Other inventions allowed Shanks to be almost dead accurate as to the sequence of cards as they were dealt. How could Dennis not hire a guy who had put a computer in a boot during the 1970s? That effort just screamed, “Do anything to win.” Mike Carr, on the other hand, had built a name for himself at the role-playing game firm Dungeons and Dragons, where he developed a cult following with his “war-gaming” authorship. He had also developed a board game, “Fight In The Skies,” which modeled World War I-style air combat. He just happened to pick up the Wall Street Journal for the first time in six months and saw the ad. He called it “Divine Providence.”

Jerry Parker, who would make the cut and go on to become the most successful TurtleTrader of all, knew the potential life-changing ramifications of being selected. The unassuming accountant and evangelical Christian, with a proper side part to his hair, was not headed down the trading path prior to seeing the C&D ad. He said, “I was a small town person [from Lynchburg, Virginia] and Richard Dennis rescued me from leading a normal life.” Parker would later build Chesapeake Capital into a billion-dollar systematic trading firm using the exact rules Dennis taught him.

What Dennis Was Actually Looking For

The diversity of the final group was no accident. Dennis deliberately selected people from radically different backgrounds to test whether the rules alone could produce successful traders, regardless of prior experience or education. His picks included college graduates from Brown University, the University of Chicago, the New England Conservatory of Music, and the United States Air Force Academy. Others had recently worked as a security guard, a salesperson, a restaurant assistant manager, a bartender, and a Dungeons and Dragons board game designer. One student simply declared his status as “unemployed.”

Dennis selected one woman from the ad, a rarity in the 1980s world of Chicago trading, and also selected gay students, whether he knew their orientation at the time or not. His picks ran the gamut from mild-mannered professional academics to regular-guy blue-collar types, to some with wildly volatile personalities. What they shared was a willingness to take calculated risks and a capacity to think in terms of probability rather than prediction. Dennis wanted people who enjoyed games of chance and could think like a Vegas handicapper.

He was not interested in IQ scores, prestigious degrees, or Wall Street connections. As he explained it, the ability to trade was about having the right mental software, not the right educational background. His goal was to implant his systematic approach into the brains of his students and see whether the rules alone could generate great traders, regardless of who was applying them.

The Original Richard Dennis Want Ad

The TurtleTrader selection process began with one of the most unusual job advertisements ever placed in a financial newspaper. Dennis’s firm, C&D Commodities, budgeted $15,000 for classified ads placed in the Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, and the International Herald Tribune during late 1983 and 1984. The ad read:

Richard J. Dennis of C&D Commodities is accepting applications for the position of Commodity Futures Trader to expand his established group of traders. 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: they will not be allowed to trade futures for themselves or others. Traders will be paid a percentage of their trading profits, and will be allowed a small draw. Prior experience in trading will be considered, but is not necessary. Applicants should send a brief resume with one sentence giving their reasons for applying to: C&D Commodities 141 W. Jackson, Suite 2313 Chicago, IL 60604 Attn: Dale Dellutri. Applications must be received by October 1, 1984. No telephone calls will be accepted.

Lost in the back pages of national newspapers, the ad attracted surprisingly few respondents given what Dennis was offering. It was as if the Washington Redskins had advertised open positions regardless of age, weight, or football experience. Perhaps most stunning was that C&D Commodities was going to teach proprietary trading concepts, completely unheard of at the time since great moneymaking trading systems were always kept under lock and key.

The TurtleTrader Application Process: Letters, Tests, and Interviews

After sending in their résumés, applicants who made the first cut received a letter and a test. The letter was formal and utilitarian, reflecting none of Dennis’s energy and spirit. In by-the-book attorney-speak, it said that if selected, Turtles would get 15 percent of the profits as salary after they completed a short training period and a short trial trading period. All potential students were told they would have to relocate to Chicago.

Prospective students were asked for their college entrance exam scores. If they did not have those, they needed to explain why. Then came the most revealing part of the process: a 63-question true-or-false test designed to expose exactly how applicants thought about trading, risk, and market behaviour. The questions appeared easy at first glance but were deliberately tricky on second thought. Understanding why each answer is true or false reveals the core philosophy behind the TurtleTrader system.

The Full 63-Question True/False Test

These are the exact questions that every TurtleTrader candidate had to answer. They remain one of the most complete publicly available windows into how Richard Dennis and William Eckhardt thought about markets, risk, and the psychology of trading.

1. One should favor being long or being short, whichever one is comfortable with.
2. On initiation, one should know precisely at what price to liquidate if a profit occurs.
3. One should trade the same number of contracts in all markets.
4. If one has $100,000 to risk, one ought to risk $25,000 on every trade.
5. On initiation, one should know precisely where to liquidate if a loss occurs.
6. You can never go broke taking profits.
7. It helps to have the fundamentals in your favor before you initiate.
8. A gap up is a good place to initiate if an uptrend has started.
9. If you anticipate buy stops in the market, wait until they are finished and buy a little higher than that.
10. Of three types of orders (market, stop, and resting), market orders cost the least skid.
11. The more bullish news you hear and the more people are going long, the less likely the uptrend is to continue after a substantial uptrend.
12. The majority of traders are always wrong.
13. Trading bigger is an overall handicap to one’s trading performance.
14. Larger traders can “muscle” markets to their advantage.
15. Vacations are important for traders to keep the proper perspective.
16. Under trading is almost never a problem.
17. Ideally, average profits should be about three or four times average losses.
18. A trader should be willing to let profits turn into losses.
19. A very high percentage of trades should be profits.
20. A trader should like to take losses.
21. It is especially relevant when the market is higher than it’s been in 4 and 13 weeks.
22. Needing and wanting money are good motivators to good trading.
23. One’s natural inclinations are good guides to decision making in trading.
24. Luck is an ingredient in successful trading over the long run.
25. When you’re long, “limit up” is a good place to take a profit.
26. It takes money to make money.
27. It’s good to follow hunches in trading.
28. There are players in each market one should not trade against.
29. All speculators die broke.
30. The market can be understood better through social psychology than through economics.
31. Taking a loss should be a difficult decision for traders.
32. After a big profit, the next trend-following trade is more likely to be a loss.
33. Trends are not likely to persist.
34. Almost all information about a commodity is at least a little useful in helping make decisions.
35. It’s better to be an expert in one to two markets rather than try to trade ten or more markets.
36. In a winning streak, total risk should rise dramatically.
37. Trading stocks is similar to trading commodities.
38. It’s a good idea to know how much you are ahead or behind during a trading session.
39. A losing month is an indication of doing something wrong.
40. A losing week is an indication of doing something wrong.
41. The big money in trading is made when one can get long at lows after a big downtrend.
42. It’s good to average down when buying.
43. After a long trend, the market requires more consolidation before another trend starts.
44. It’s important to know what to do if trading in commodities doesn’t succeed.
45. It is not helpful to watch every quote in the markets one trades.
46. It is a good idea to put on or take off a position all at once.
47. Diversification in commodities is better than always being in one or two markets.
48. If a day’s profit or loss makes a significant difference to your net worth, you’re overtrading.
49. A trader learns more from his losses than his profits.
50. Except for commission and brokerage fees, execution “costs” for entering orders are minimal over the course of a year.
51. It’s easier to trade well than to trade poorly.
52. It’s important to know what success in trading will do for you later in life.
53. Uptrends end when everyone gets bearish.
54. The more bullish news you hear, the less likely a market is to break out on the upside.
55. For an off-floor trader, a long-term trade ought to last three or four weeks or less.
56. Others’ opinions of the market are good to follow.
57. Volume and open interest are as important as price action.
58. Daily strength and weakness is a good guide for liquidating long-term positions with big profits.
59. Off-floor traders should spread different markets of different market groups.
60. The more people are going long, the less likely an uptrend is to continue in the beginning of a trend.
61. Off-floor traders should not spread different delivery months of the same commodity.
62. Buying dips and selling rallies is a good strategy.
63. It’s important to take a profit most of the time.

The Essay Questions

Beyond the true/false test, Dennis asked candidates essay questions designed to reveal character, self-awareness, and how they processed risk and failure. These questions remain a remarkable insight into what separates traders who succeed from those who do not. Dennis placed the passion to achieve at the top of his list. You have to wake up with that inner drive and desire to make it happen. You have to go for it.

1. What were your standard test results on college entrance exams?
2. Name a book or movie you like and why.
3. Name a historical figure you like and why.
4. Why would you like to succeed at this job?
5. Name a risky thing you have done and why.
6. Explain a decision you have made under pressure and why that was your decision.
7. Hope, fear, and greed are said to be enemies of good traders. Explain a decision you may have made under one of these influences and how you view that decision now.
8. What are some good qualities you have that might help in trading?
9. What are some bad qualities you have that might hurt in trading?
10. In trading would you rather be good or lucky? Why?
11. Is there anything else you’d like to add?

What Happened to the TurtleTraders After Selection

Once selected, the TurtleTraders received two weeks of intensive training from Dennis and William Eckhardt, covering every aspect of the trend following system: when to enter trades, when to exit, how to size positions based on market volatility, and how to manage risk across a diversified portfolio of futures markets. They were then given funded accounts and sent to trade.

The results proved Dennis right. As a group, the TurtleTraders generated over $100 million in profits. Jerry Parker, who had been an obscure accountant in rural Virginia before answering the ad, went on to build Chesapeake Capital into a firm managing over $1 billion. The selection process that Dennis designed, one that ignored credentials and focused on character, thinking style, and psychological makeup, had worked exactly as he predicted.

The full story of what the TurtleTraders were taught, how the experiment unfolded, and what happened to every member of the group is documented in Michael Covel’s book The Complete TurtleTrader, the only account with on-the-record interviews from the TurtleTraders themselves.

Frequently Asked Questions About the TurtleTrader Selection Process

How many people applied to become a TurtleTrader?

Over 1,000 people applied. Richard Dennis selected just 23 people across two training classes in 1983 and 1984.

What background did the TurtleTraders have?

Deliberately diverse. The group included a blackjack player, a board game designer, a former actor, an Air Force pilot, a Harvard MBA, a computer programmer, and an accountant from rural Virginia. Most had no trading experience whatsoever. Dennis chose this variety intentionally to test whether the rules alone could produce successful traders regardless of background.

Did you need trading experience to become a TurtleTrader?

No. The original Dennis want ad explicitly stated that prior experience was not necessary. Dennis believed that trading could be taught to anyone with the right attitude, and the Turtle experiment was designed to prove it. Several of the most successful TurtleTraders, including Jerry Parker, had no trading experience at all when they were selected.

What was the TurtleTrader true/false test?

Every applicant who passed the initial résumé review was sent a 63-question true/false test designed to reveal how they thought about trading, risk, and market behaviour. The questions tested intuitions about trend following, position sizing, risk management, and trading psychology. The full test is documented in the section above.

How were TurtleTraders paid?

Selected students received 15 percent of the profits they generated trading Dennis’s money, plus a small draw during training. They were not allowed to trade for themselves or others while in the programme.

What were the TurtleTraders taught?

Dennis and Eckhardt spent two weeks teaching the TurtleTraders a complete trend following system: when to enter trades based on price breakouts, when to exit losing and winning trades, how to size positions based on market volatility, and how to manage risk across a diversified portfolio. The full TurtleTrader rules are documented here.

Who was the most successful TurtleTrader?

Jerry Parker of Chesapeake Capital is widely regarded as the most successful of all the original TurtleTraders. Starting from a funded account in 1983 with no prior trading experience, he built one of the most respected systematic trading firms in the world, managing over $1 billion at its peak.

The next step after understanding the selection process is understanding what the TurtleTraders were actually taught. Read the original TurtleTrader rules