Howard Seidler is one of the original Turtles, trained directly by Richard Dennis in 1983. After the program ended he founded Saxon Investment Corporation, running it as a one-man operation with the quiet discipline that characterized the Turtles who built lasting careers without seeking public attention. The 1989 Wall Street Journal ranking placed him at a 64.2 percent average annual return, putting him solidly in the top half of one of the most successful groups of systematic traders ever assembled. His value to anyone studying the Turtle story is not just the numbers. It is the clarity with which he articulated what systematic trading actually requires at the psychological level.
How He Got There
Seidler’s route to trading began earlier than most. His father dabbled in the markets, which gave him childhood exposure to the idea that prices moved and that movement could be tracked. By high school he had become specifically aware of the futures markets — an unusually early orientation that gave him a conceptual head start when Dennis’s training formalized those instincts into a complete system. Futures demand a more explicit relationship with risk than equity investing. The margin structures mean a bad trade can wipe out an account before a discretionary trader has time to rationalize staying in. Seidler arrived at the Turtle program already thinking in those terms.
Dennis and William Eckhardt designed the selection process to find candidates who could follow rules under pressure rather than override them when things got uncomfortable. Seidler made the cut and trained with the first cohort, receiving the complete Turtle framework: breakout entries, volatility-adjusted position sizing, pyramiding into winners, and systematic stop exits. The philosophy underlying the rules was as important as the rules themselves — trend following produces its edge across a large sample of trades, not on any individual one.
Saxon Investment Corporation
When Dennis wound down the program Seidler launched Saxon as a sole-operator CTA. The decision to run lean was deliberate. When a system generates the signals and the risk rules define the sizes, organizational complexity adds friction without adding edge. Saxon kept the methodology clean and the overhead low. The 64.2 percent average annual return in the WSJ rankings — achieved without management fees and with minimal commissions during the early period — reflected what the Turtle system produced when executed with fidelity by someone who understood it deeply. Jerry Parker‘s Chesapeake eventually grew into a larger institution, but the edge was always the system, not the headcount. Seidler understood that from the start.
On Following Rules When You’re Losing
The hardest moment in systematic trading is not a drawdown itself — it is following the rules through a drawdown while every instinct is telling you the system is broken. Seidler addressed this directly: “You can be following your rules exactly and still lose money. In that situation, you certainly haven’t performed poorly as a trader. The basic idea is that if you follow your rules over the long run, the probabilities will be in your favour, and you’ll come out ahead. In the short run, however, conformance to a trading plan is more significant than short-term equity fluctuations.”
That reframing is more radical than it sounds. It decouples performance from outcome and ties it to process instead. A trader who abandons a sound system during a losing period has performed poorly regardless of what happens next. A trader who holds to the rules through losses has performed well regardless of the short-term account balance. Eckhardt made the same point during training: the optimal action must be the same for two traders in identical situations regardless of their recent history. Process is the only thing that can be controlled. Outcomes follow over time.
On Persistence
Staying with a system through multiple losing periods across years is a different kind of challenge than executing any single trade correctly. Seidler put it plainly: “You need to have persistence to stay with your ideas day after day, month after month, year after year, which is hard work.” The ideas he refers to are not opinions about markets. They are the tested principles behind the system. Persistence means maintaining conviction in those principles when the environment is testing them — which it will, repeatedly, in any strategy with genuine long-run edge.
This is why Dennis trained the Turtles so intensively on the reasoning behind the rules, not just the rules themselves. A trader who understands why a system works can sustain belief in it when results are poor. One who only memorized the rules has no foundation to stand on when the drawdown arrives. Paul Tudor Jones kept visible reminders of his rules on his desk for the same reason. The mechanics are easy. The persistence is hard.
On Respect vs. Fear
Of everything Seidler said publicly about trading, this distinction may be the most useful: “It’s important to distinguish between respect for the market and fear of the market. While it’s essential to respect the market to assure preservation of capital, you can’t win if you’re fearful of losing. Fear will keep you from making correct decisions.”
Respect means building in stops, sizing conservatively, and never assuming you know more than the price action is telling you. It is the epistemic humility that Ed Seykota described as a prerequisite for survival. Fear is something different — a psychological state that prevents execution. A fearful trader hesitates at entries, exits winners prematurely, and holds losers past the stop because pulling the trigger feels like confirming the loss. The Turtle rules were partly designed to eliminate that space. When the signal fires, the rules define the action. There is nothing left to decide, and therefore nothing left to fear. Respect keeps you alive. Fear keeps you from winning. Seidler’s formulation draws the line between them with precision that most traders take decades to find.
The WSJ Rankings and the Turtle Legacy
The September 1989 Wall Street Journal article was the first comprehensive public documentation of what the Turtle program had produced. Seidler’s 64.2 percent placed him above Tom Shanks (63.7%) and below Paul Rabar (89.1%) and Philip Lu (88.9%). The entire cohort significantly outperformed both the Barclay CTA Index and the S&P 500. Taken together the results demonstrated that the approach worked consistently across multiple individuals — which was precisely the point Dennis had been trying to make from the beginning.
Seidler’s quiet, durable operation of Saxon in the years after the program validated something beyond the initial rankings: that the edge was real and portable, not a product of Dennis’s capital or the favorable early conditions. The Turtle experiment produced its answer. Seidler spent the following decades confirming it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Howard Seidler?
Howard Seidler is one of the original Turtle traders trained by Richard Dennis in 1983. He founded Saxon Investment Corporation after the program ended and posted a 64.2 percent average annual return in the 1989 Wall Street Journal ranking of Turtle traders.
What is Saxon Investment Corporation?
Saxon Investment Corporation is the one-man CTA Seidler founded after leaving the Turtle program. It applied the systematic trend following methodology across diversified global futures markets, keeping the operation lean and the process clean.
What did Seidler mean by conformance to a plan being more important than short-term results?
He was making a precise point about what good trading actually means. Because trend following produces its edge across a large sample of trades rather than on individual ones, the quality of execution — fidelity to the rules — matters more than any short-term outcome. A trader who follows the rules correctly during a losing period has done the job well. Results follow process over time.
How did Seidler rank among the original Turtles?
In the 1989 WSJ ranking he placed in the upper tier at 64.2 percent average annual return, above Tom Shanks and below Paul Rabar and Philip Lu. The full cohort of fourteen significantly outperformed both the Barclay CTA Index and the S&P 500 over the same period.
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