Russell Sands is the same guy than than turtletrader.com or is it yet another one ? How was he able to create a hedge fund based on the reputation of the turtles without being attacked ? How is it that he is associated with Larry Williams in promoting his seminars ?
And how do you explain that Richard Dennis, the creator of the turtles, exploded his funds twice ? I don't mean to be harsh as I know perfectly that it can happen to any hedge fund that bases its method on martingale but I would like your opinion.
I believe Russell used the success of the other Turtles and his claimed access to "secret" information to raise money. I think both he and Larry have always been more interested in seminars, books and selling trading related items than in trading. I have no idea how they got together but I put them in the same category.
As I explained in the other thread referred to above, Richard Dennis, has not yet made the transition from Trader to Money Manager successfully, but he's been quite successful as a trader.
One of the issues is the way that investors look at total account equity which includes open position profits. As Turtles, we didn't even care about open equity levels, we looked at trades when they closed out. So we never counted our chickens until they were hatched.
If you made a trade that put your account up 50%, we viewed that as a good thing. We didn't care so much that we may have been up 200% a few weeks prior to our exit. Yeah sure, we would rather have closed out the trade at up 150%, but we weren't complaining about making 50% on a trade.
That same trade would result in "blowing up" a managed account or fund since going from up 200% to up 50% is a 50% drawdown.
You can make a lot of money ignoring open trade profits. I'm not saying that's the best way to look at things, or that we couldn't have made more money by giving back less, but it certainly was and is a reasonable approach that can work well if you can handle the drawdowns from a psychological perspective.
Unlike most investors, Rich was comfortable with this kind of give back of open position profits. This approach is definitely not correct for managing a fund or institutional money.
Many of the Turtles couldn't handle these kinds of drawdowns and they either traded less agressively and didn't make the same level returns or just plain weren't profitable because of the resultant psychological destabilization.
- Curtis