Jerry Parker: the most successful Turtle
An accountant from Virginia when he answered the ad, Jerry Parker was in the first Turtle class of 1983. After the program ended he founded Chesapeake Capital in 1988, and it grew into one of the largest trend-following firms of the 1990s, reportedly managing well over a billion dollars at its peak. Parker still runs Chesapeake today and has become the most visible advocate of the original philosophy, appearing regularly on systematic trading podcasts and posting actively about trend following. Of everyone in the program, he is the strongest evidence for Dennis's side of the bet: an ordinary professional, handed a system, who compounded it into a career spanning five decades.
Liz Cheval: the pioneer
One of the few women in the program, Liz Cheval founded EMC Capital Management in 1988 and ran it for a quarter century, making her one of the longest-tenured women in managed futures. She died unexpectedly in 2013 at age 56, and EMC continued operating after her death. Her track record over 25 years remains one of the strongest arguments that the Turtle approach could survive long after the 1980s.
Curtis Faith: the prodigy who published the rules
The youngest Turtle, recruited at nineteen, Curtis Faith is reported to have earned more than $30 million for Dennis during the program. He left the money management industry afterward, worked in software, and became the person who finally put the complete system into print with Way of the Turtle in 2007 (we cover it in our full review). His life after trading has been turbulent by his own account, a reminder that early success in markets guarantees nothing outside them.
The quiet professionals
Several Turtles built long, low-profile careers managing money after the program wound down in 1988:
- Paul Rabar founded Rabar Market Research, a managed-futures firm that traded client capital for decades.
- Tom Shanks founded Hawksbill Capital Management, known for an aggressive interpretation of the original approach.
- Howard Seidler ran Saxon Investment Corporation.
- Jim DiMaria founded JPD Enterprises and traded trend-following programs for many years.
The pattern among them is striking: those who stayed in the industry mostly kept trading some evolution of the same system they learned in two weeks in 1983. The rules aged; the philosophy did not.
The ones who walked away
Not every Turtle stayed. The group was deliberately eclectic, and some members, including the game designer and the blackjack player whose backgrounds made the recruiting famous, returned to other pursuits or left public view entirely. A few reportedly struggled once they traded their own capital without Dennis's backing, which itself became one of the experiment's lessons: the system was learnable, but executing it without a safety net was a different psychological problem.
What the class proves
The dispersion of outcomes is the honest footnote to the legend. Everyone got the same rules and the same training, yet results ranged from billion-dollar firms to quiet exits. Discipline, temperament, and the willingness to keep taking signals separated the tiers, exactly as William Eckhardt predicted talent would. Dennis won the bet, but Eckhardt's side of the argument did not lose entirely. The full story of the program is told best in The Complete TurtleTrader, which followed up with the Turtles decades later.
Learn the system they were taught
The rules that produced these careers are public, and simpler than you might expect.