Richard Dennis
Richard Dennis (born January 9, 1949 in Chicago ) is a former commodity speculator nicknamed "The Prince of the Pit". He became famous with the saying "You can breed traders like turtles in Singapore", which he tried to prove in an experiment with his friend and mathematician William Eckhardt .
Life
At the age of 17, Dennis was already working as an errand boy on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange . Since he was not allowed to trade himself, his father bought shares for him. But the deal was not a success. At the age of 21 he began to study philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago (graduation in 1970: Bachelor of Arts ), later he received a scholarship to Tulane University in Louisiana. But when he was 23 he returned to Chicago and borrowed $ 2,000 to go back to work on the Mid America Exchange. The place cost 1,600 USD and he speculated with the rest. And he was lucky: it was 1972 and he observed that grain prices continued to rise despite increasing supply. The reason was the Russians, who bought up grain on a large scale on the world market after bad harvests. It went down in history as the "Great Russian Grain Robbery". Dennis was a millionaire at 25, and by 1980 it was 400 million.
The dream ended on October 19, 1987, when he speculated about the stock market crash , the Dow Jones index lost approx. 22.6%, Dennis and his funds a lot of money. In 1990 a lawsuit came to a settlement in which he paid $ 2.5 million. He retired for a while and came back in 1994 with a computerized trading system. In 2000 he retired again, his fund had lost 50%.
In his private life he had often donated to political parties and was on the board of directors of the Cato Institute . Here he published the essay Toward a Moral Drug Policy in 1991 .
The turtle traders
In 1983 Dennis and his friend William Eckhardt did an experiment: Can you learn to speculate or is it a talent? 10 volunteers were trained as punters within 14 days and were each asked to speculate with 1,000,000 (real) USD on the stock market.
The two ran ads in the New York Times and the Washington Post . Out of 1000 applicants, 10 were selected and trained in 14 days. Their range ranged from chess grandmasters to 19-year-old school leavers (Curtis Faith). On average, what Dennis called the Turtles made 80% profit.
literature
- Curtis Faith, "The Strategies of Turtle Traders," ISBN 978-3898792851
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE5DE143DF93BA15753C1A961948260
- ↑ http://www.businessweek.com/1997/14/b3521101.htm
- ↑ - ( Memento of the original from January 5, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Dennis, Richard |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | The Prince of the Pit |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American punter, investor |
| DATE OF BIRTH | January 9, 1949 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Chicago |