Chapter 7. Simplicity and Speed: Training to Be a Master

“Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

—Aristotle

Richard Dennis—at the very height of his fame for having turned $10,000 into an estimated $200 million—gave 12 strangers only two weeks of training in his methods in year one of the Turtle experiment. Then after only 20 days of practice trading—for many of us, it was the only trading we had ever done—he gave us millions of dollars of his money to trade. The following year, he again trained some new traders, but he reduced the training to a single week. The amount of left-brain knowledge that one can impart in a single week is fairly limited. Dennis obviously did not believe that trading was complicated.