Trend Following Trading System | The Turtle Traders!

Learn the Turtle Traders trend following strategy. This system uses breakouts of 40-day, 20-day, and 100-bar highs/lows on Daily or intraday timeframes to trade

Published · Updated · Methodology: Technical Indicators

Part of: Trend Following

  • Methodology: Technical Indicators
  • Content type: strategy
  • Timeframes: Daily, 180 minute, 120 minute, 240 minute
  • Markets: Gold Futures, Heating Oil Futures, US 30-year Bond, Gasoline RB

Indicators used

  • 40-day high/low
  • 20-day high/low
  • 100-bar high/low
  • 35-bar high/low

Source video

Decoded from: Trend Following Trading System | The Turtle Traders! by Ali Casey | StatOasis — watch the original

Key timestamps:

  • 0:00 - Introduction to Turtle Traders
  • 2:58 - Original 40-day breakout system explained
  • 3:45 - Original 20-day exit system explained
  • 4:58 - Optimized strategy parameters (100-bar entry, 35-bar exit)
  • 6:50 - Optimization process and results
  • 8:30 - Portfolio diversification with multiple timeframes and instruments

Strategy overview

Trend following bets that an existing directional move is more likely to continue than to reverse, and no system is more closely associated with that idea than the one taught to the Turtle Traders — the 1980s experiment in which a commodities trader recruited a group of complete beginners and handed them a fully mechanical breakout system to see whether trading could be taught rather than intuited. The Turtles matter historically not because their rules were sophisticated, but because they were written down, followed literally, and produced a record that made "rules on paper" a credible alternative to discretion.

This entry decodes Ali Casey's video on the StatOasis channel, which treats the Turtle system less as a museum piece than as a testable artifact. The video walks through the original breakout-entry and breakout-exit construction, then does something the original Turtles never could: it runs the parameters through an optimization pass to ask whether the lengths chosen four decades ago are still the right ones, or whether they were simply the numbers that happened to fit the markets of that era.

That re-testing framing is what distinguishes this entry from a straight retelling of the Turtle story. The video also pushes the system beyond its original home on daily bars into intraday timeframes and across multiple instruments, treating diversification as part of the system rather than an afterthought — which is where most of the practical difficulty in running a Turtle-style approach actually lives. No formal rule set was extracted for this entry, so the page covers the concept and the structure of the video's argument rather than a step-by-step specification.

Topics

trend following strategy · trading strategy · pine script · tradingview strategy · technical indicators · futures trading strategy · daily trading strategy · intraday strategy · turtle traders strategy · gold futures strategy · oil futures strategy · breakout strategy · swing trading

Frequently asked questions

Who were the Turtle Traders?

The Turtles were a group of novice traders recruited in the early 1980s by commodities trader Richard Dennis, who — as a wager with his partner William Eckhardt — taught them a mechanical trend-following breakout system to test whether successful trading could be taught rather than being an innate talent.

Is the original Turtle system still relevant today?

That is precisely the question this video sets out to examine. Rather than assuming the original settings still hold, it re-runs them through an optimization process and compares the outcome against the historical configuration. The comparison itself is presented in the source video.

Does a Turtle-style system only work on daily charts?

The original system was built around daily bars, but breakout logic is timeframe-agnostic in principle. This video extends the approach onto shorter intraday timeframes and discusses running it across several instruments at once as a way to spread exposure.

How do I evaluate a trend-following system like this before trading it?

Test it across a long history and multiple instruments, since trend following typically produces many small losses punctuated by a few large winners — a short sample can be badly misleading. Strategy Decoder catalogs strategies like this one from video sources so you can review the structure and test it yourself on TradingView.

About this strategy page

This trading strategy was decoded by Strategy Decoder's AI from a public YouTube trading video and turned into a structured, reviewable specification. In the interactive app this page shows the full entry and exit logic, risk management settings, the indicators involved with their parameters, AlgoWizard-compatible logic and a Pine Script export ready for TradingView backtesting — plus an automated backtest verdict when one has been computed for this strategy.

Strategy Decoder catalogs 2,229 decoded strategies. Each one is extracted with confidence scoring, cross-linked to the indicators it uses, and kept up to date as new videos are processed daily. Load this page with JavaScript enabled to use the interactive tools, or start from the strategy explorer to filter by methodology, market and timeframe.

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