From Billionaire Trading Genius to Only 27 Dollars Left: The Fall of the Author of the Turtle Trading Rules

In the 1980s, Wall Street's “Turtle Trading Experiment” shocked the world, proving that ordinary people could become market winners through systematic trading. The author of “The Turtle Trading Rules,” Curtis Faith, was the brightest star in this experiment—selected at the age of 19, he earned over $30 million for the team and was hailed as the “most successful turtle.” However, decades later, he fell from millionaire status to homelessness, with only $27 left in his pocket. This is a true story of a fall from the heights of finance to the margins of society.

The Legendary Starting Point of Turtle Trading

In 1983, legendary trader Richard Dennis and mathematician William Eckhardt embarked on a gamble to verify whether “traders are born or made.” Dennis placed a recruitment ad in The Wall Street Journal and ultimately selected a dozen students with almost no trading experience to bring to Chicago for a two-week crash course.

The core system is a strict mechanical trend tracking: standardizing risk with the “N value”, strictly adhering to entry and exit and stop-loss rules, completely eliminating emotional interference. As a result, this batch of “turtles” earned Dennis over 175 million dollars in just a few years, with an annualized return rate of up to 80%.

The youngest and most brilliant “sea turtle”

Nineteen years old Curtis Faith is the youngest participant and the most successful one in the eyes of the media. He generated over 30 million dollars in profits during the experiment, becoming a living example of systematic trading.

After the experiment, he documented his experience in “Way of the Turtle,” making the originally closed trading system public and becoming a foundational reading for countless traders. The book emphasizes discipline, patience, and risk control, telling readers that “success lies not in predicting the market, but in steadfastly executing a system with a positive expected value.”

However, these ideals were gradually forgotten in his own life.

From k Millionaire to Business Collapse

After leaving the Turtle Program, Feis's entrepreneurial journey faced repeated setbacks. In 2003, he founded a commodity fund management company “Acceleration Capital,” but it fell into chaos due to employee embezzlement and his own absentee management. In 2007, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) revoked his registration on the grounds of agent fraud, completely ending his career in compliant asset management.

After the business collapsed, his financial situation took a turn for the worse. By 2012, he admitted in an interview that he had “nothing” left, with only 27 dollars in his pocket.

Legal Disputes and Social Marginalization

In the following decade, Fei Si's name frequently appeared in court records across various states in the United States: property damage, possession of controlled substances, theft, burglary, disturbing the peace… His last registered address was a homeless shelter in Boston.

In 2022, he was arrested for refusing to leave a hotel and clashing with staff, and weeks later he was detained again for smashing products in a grocery store and falsely reporting a fire. The police report described him as a “homeless man,” a stark contrast to the image of the young genius from the 1980s.

From System Victory to Human Tragedy

The turtle experiment proves that traders can be “created”, but the life of Fei Si reveals another side: even with a perfect trading system, if discipline and self-restraint are lost, human weaknesses can still destroy everything.

His surname Faith became the most ironic footnote - losing faith meant losing the foundation that supported him at the peak of the market.

Conclusion

The story of Curtis Faith is a cruel parable in financial history: discipline and systems can take you to the top, but what truly determines whether you can stand firm for the long term is your self-management in the face of temptation and setbacks. The market can create a billionaire, but it can also push him to the streets in an instant.