To circumvent a rule requiring traders to be at least twenty-one years of age, he worked as his own runner, and hired his father, who traded in his stead in the pit.
Dennis profited, as he bought successively new weekly and monthly highs in the trending inflationary markets of the 1970s, an era of repeated crop failures and the "Great Russian Grain Robbery" of 1972, when agents of the Soviet Union secretly purchased 30% of the U.S. wheat crop in the space of a few weeks.
This set the stage for solid, sustained price trends in both directions for the next several years, a period in which "anyone with a simple trend-following method and a dart board could make a million dollars".
After the trial period, those who successfully implemented the system were allocated accounts to manage, with amounts ranging from $250,000 to $2 million of Dennis's personal funds.
[9] The exact system taught to the Turtles by Dennis has been published in at least two books and can be back-tested to check its performance in recent years.
[10] However, a number of turtles (e.g., Jerry Parker of Chesapeake Capital, Liz Cheval of EMC, Paul Rabar of Rabar Market Research, Tom Shanks of Hawksbill Capital Management, Howard Seidler of Saxon Investment Corporation, Jim DiMaria of JPD Enterprises, Inc.) began and continued careers as successful commodity trading managers, using techniques similar, but not identical, to the Turtle System.