Michael Shannon was a Turtle trained by Richard Dennis. He recently offered this update to TurtleTrader.com:
The term "turtle" comes from a potential investment by Richard Dennis into a turtle farm in Southeast Asia for use as fertilizer and animal feed. In an obscure interview with Mr. Dennis, the interviewer coined the term to describe us and for some bizarre reason it stuck. I left the "Turtle" program when Richard Dennis discontinued it and decided to further sharpen my trading skills and educate myself to be a better trader. I relocated to Europe to expand the methodology to include the international futures markets. Later I joined legendary trader Thomas Baldwin in Chicago to get a better sense of micro trading and strategic trade execution to enhance performance. After that I felt that the turtle methodology was viable in the stock market (and other markets including options, forwards and FX) and was fortunate to be offered a position at BNP/Cooper Neff, the largest arbitrage program trading firm in the world. It was a very rewarding experience working with Richard Cooper and Andy Sterge the current CEO. Finally, I was hired by the European trading guru Dr. Kaveh Alamouti a former professor from the London School of Economics. He is currently running a US$ one billion fund for Louis Bacon of Moore Capital management in London. Currently, I am on hiatus from trading to pursue political and other personal causes but I'm in the process of putting a "dream team" of traders together that will trade highly diversified global markets. In short, I love trading and risk.
M.J. Shannon, October 2003
