Is Trading Ability Innate or Acquired?

Richard Dennis, who burst onto the Chicago Board of Trade like a comet in the 1980s and made hundreds of millions of dollars.

Based on his own experience, he was convinced that anyone could become a great trader if they learned how to trade properly, and he argued about it with William Eckhardt, his school friend and longtime business partner.

Eckhardt believed that a fund manager of Richard Dennis's caliber was born, not made, while Dennis, on the contrary, believed that anyone could become a legendary fund manager like him if properly taught.
So he conducted an experiment to see whether stock or futures investors could be raised like turtles.

To settle the bet on who was right, he placed an ad in <The Wall Street Journal〉 recruiting trainees.
In 1983 and 1984, Dennis recruited 23 students after only psychological and personality tests.
They were people far removed from the stock market, working in a variety of occupations such as computer programmers and farmers, and Dennis provided 30 million dollars in investment capital.

He taught them only a simple trend-following strategy for just two weeks, and called the students the Turtles.
Within a few years, they astonished the market by earning an average return of 1,874%, growing assets of 30 million dollars into 500 million dollars.
This turtle trading technique gained absolute trust among ordinary investors who entered stock investing in the 1980s.
In a feature article on the Turtle program, The Wall Street Journal reported, "The most successful of the Turtles was Curtis Faith. Faith, who joined the Turtle program as the youngest at age nineteen at the time, earned Dennis an enormous profit of 31.5 million dollars."

Richard Dennis is a legendary Wall Street trader who started with a few hundred dollars and had already made hundreds of millions of dollars by age thirty-seven.
In 1986 alone he earned 80 million dollars, putting him on par with George Soros, who earned 100 million dollars that same year, and Michael Milken, who made 80 million dollars.

In this way, it has been proven that trading ability is a skill with which one can fully succeed through education and practice.