He turned $400 into $200M, so I stole his Strategy

Summary

The video revisits Richard Dennis and William Eckhardt’s Turtle Trading experiment, then backtests a simplified, long-only breakout strategy across five markets over nearly 11 years. The narrator concludes that the strategy remained profitable in the test, including in a version adapted to close positions overnight and reopen them intraday.

These are backtest results, not evidence of future performance.

Strategy Framework

• Entry: Buy when the price breaks above the highest price of the previous 20 days.
• Stops: Exit at whichever level is reached first:
  • A fixed stop 2 × the 20-day ATR below the entry price; or
  • A trailing stop at the lowest price of the previous 10 days, recalculated daily.
• Profit target: None. The strategy relies on occasional sustained trends outweighing smaller losses.
• Risk per position: 2% of the account’s high-water mark.

The test differs from the original rules: it uses long positions only, does not pyramid into winning trades, and focuses on markets selected for current conditions.

Intraday Variation

The intraday version closes positions at 4:30 p.m. New York time and reopens them at 6:00 p.m. if the price remains above the stop. The narrator says this avoids overnight swap fees and spread widening, but incurs the spread again and misses about 90 minutes of market activity.

The free, open-source TradingView indicator displays the entry level, trailing stop, and active stop. Its lines update once daily. According to the narrator, chart time frames from 1 to 30 minutes change the display, not the strategy.

Markets and Reported Results

The backtest covers the S&P 500, Nasdaq, gold, silver, and Bitcoin.

Version Annualized return Maximum drawdown Profit factor Sharpe ratio Overnight 27.3% 37.6% 1.8 in one passage; 1.88 later 1.04 Intraday 31.2% 37.9% 2.11 1.31

For the overnight version, the narrator reports that an initial $100,000 grew to $1,332,967. Both versions had two losing years during the 11-year period: 2018 and 2022.

Other results and examples mentioned include:

• Bitcoin had a 3.01 profit factor in the overnight test, based on 66 trades. Its profit factor fell to 2.72 in the intraday version, while those of the other assets improved.
• A Nasdaq example captured a trend that gained more than 17% in under two months.
• Overnight holding incurred nearly $500,000 in swap fees over the test period.

Historical Context and Cautions

The Wall Street Journal reportedly cited an 80% compound annual return for 14 Turtles. The narrator notes that drawdowns were high and trading costs were below average. The video also says later accounts attributed more than $100 million in profits to the group, while noting that the earnings figure was not audited.

The narrator describes initial tests on individual stocks as promising but recommends independent research. The video also emphasizes portfolio testing: each asset generates relatively few trades, while combining all five creates more opportunities for compounding. It says TradingView’s single-asset backtesting cannot test the portfolio as a whole.

Other cautions include substantial drawdowns, overnight costs and spreads, and the possibility that some funding firms may not permit adding to winning positions—a feature of the original approach.

Presenter and Sources

Presenter: Revelio Trading narrator

Sources mentioned:

• Stanley W. Angrist’s 1989 Wall Street Journal article
• Curtis Faith’s The Original Turtle Trading Rules (2003) and Way of the Turtle (2007)
• Jack D. Schwager’s Market Wizards (1989)
• Barclay Trading Group performance data

Michael Covel is mentioned as the author of a best-selling book about the Turtles, not as an original Turtle.