Ken Jakubzak is a second generation Turtle trained by former Turtle Craig Soderquist. He currently runs the Turtle-trading, style firm KMJ Capital Management, Inc. More on Turtles.
The Second Generation: How the Turtle Lineage Extends
The original TurtleTrader experiment of 1983 produced twenty-three traders trained by Richard Dennis and William Eckhardt. The explicit purpose of the experiment was to test whether a systematic trading approach could be taught. It could. The Turtles who applied the rules with discipline produced strong returns, and several went on to run funds that traded for decades.
The second generation extended that proof one step further. If the first generation demonstrated that the approach was teachable, the second generation demonstrated that the knowledge could be passed on again, trader to trader, without losing its integrity. Craig Soderquist was an original Turtle who ran Soderquist, Inc. after the experiment concluded. While running that firm, he trained Ken Jakubzak in the methods he had learned from Dennis and Eckhardt. Jakubzak went on to found KMJ Capital Management and continues to trade using the Turtle-style systematic approach.
Craig Soderquist: The Teacher Between Generations
Craig Soderquist’s role in this lineage is as both practitioner and teacher. He was selected by Dennis as one of the original Turtles in 1983, built his own trading firm, and then passed the methodology on to Jakubzak while Jakubzak worked at Soderquist, Inc. Soderquist also assisted in the development of second-generation Turtle Mark J. Walsh, making him one of the more productive teachers in the post-experiment period.
This pattern of direct mentorship is how the systematic trend following approach has spread across the industry. The knowledge did not spread through books or academic papers. It spread through practitioners teaching other practitioners in working environments, where the real challenges of following a system through drawdowns and difficult market periods could be addressed in real time. Jakubzak’s training under Soderquist gave him access to that kind of direct experience, not just the rules but the judgement required to apply them under pressure.
KMJ Capital Management
KMJ Capital Management is Jakubzak’s systematic trend following firm. The name reflects the Turtle-style approach he learned from Soderquist: diversified futures trading across markets using mechanical rules for entry, exit, and position sizing. The approach traces its lineage to the methods that Dennis and Eckhardt developed and taught in Chicago in the early 1980s and that have since been demonstrated to work across multiple market regimes by practitioners in the first and second generations of the Turtle lineage.
The fact that second-generation Turtles like Jakubzak are still operating using variants of the original approach is itself evidence for the durability of the underlying method. The specific parameters change. The infrastructure changes. The markets traded expand. But the core logic, follow price trends with defined risk per trade and diversification across uncorrelated markets, is the same framework that the TurtleTrader rules encode and that Dennis and Eckhardt taught in two weeks in 1983.
What the Second Generation Tells Us About the Method
Dennis and Eckhardt designed an experiment to answer a specific question: can trading be taught? Their answer was yes. The existence of second-generation Turtles like Jakubzak extends the question: can the teaching be taught? That is, can someone trained in the method pass it on to another trader who can then use it to build a successful career?
The Jakubzak-Soderquist lineage answers that question in the affirmative. The chain from Dennis and Eckhardt to Soderquist to Jakubzak is three links long, and at each link the knowledge was transferred intact enough to support a working trading business. That is not a trivial achievement. Most investment approaches do not survive the transfer from one practitioner to another because they depend on the individual judgment and pattern recognition of the original trader. A systematic approach, one based on rules rather than intuition, can survive that transfer because the rules can be written down, tested, and taught.
Frequently Asked Questions About Ken Jakubzak
Who is Ken Jakubzak?
Ken Jakubzak is a second-generation TurtleTrader who was trained by original Turtle Craig Soderquist while working at Soderquist, Inc. He founded KMJ Capital Management, a systematic trend following firm that applies the Turtle-style approach he learned from Soderquist. His trading lineage traces back to Richard Dennis and William Eckhardt’s original 1983 Turtle training programme.
What is KMJ Capital Management?
KMJ Capital Management is Ken Jakubzak’s systematic futures trading firm. It operates in the Turtle-trading style, using mechanical rules for entry, exit, and position sizing across diversified global futures markets. The approach reflects the methodology Jakubzak learned from Craig Soderquist, which in turn traces back to the rules Dennis and Eckhardt developed and taught to the original Turtles.
Who was Craig Soderquist?
Craig Soderquist was one of the original TurtleTraders trained by Richard Dennis in 1983. He went on to run Soderquist, Inc. and trained two second-generation Turtles: Ken Jakubzak and Mark J. Walsh. His role as a teacher in the second generation makes him one of the more significant figures in the propagation of the Turtle methodology beyond the original cohort.
What is a second-generation TurtleTrader?
A second-generation TurtleTrader is a trader trained by one of the original Turtles from the 1983 Dennis-Eckhardt experiment, rather than by Dennis or Eckhardt themselves. The second generation extends the experiment’s proof of concept: if systematic trend following can be taught to the first generation, the second generation demonstrates that the first generation can teach it in turn. Ken Jakubzak, trained by Craig Soderquist, and Mark J. Walsh, also trained by Soderquist, are among the documented second-generation practitioners.
Trend Following Systems
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