Brian Proctor was a Turtle. His firm is Pro Trading. Over the years Pro Trading has been one of the best performing Turtle-trading firms. However, Proctor has retired from trading for clients and now trades only his personal account. Proctor also assisted in the development of Mark J. Walsh.
Pro Trading: Performance in the Upper Tier
Pro Trading was Brian Proctor’s systematic trend following firm, built on the rules he received from Richard Dennis and William Eckhardt during the 1983 Turtle training programme. The firm’s track record placed it among the better-performing Turtle operations, a cohort that also included Jerry Parker‘s Chesapeake Capital, Paul Rabar’s Rabar Market Research, and Jeff Gordon‘s Gordon Financial Services. Reaching the upper tier of the Turtle cohort required applying the rules with consistent discipline through losing periods as well as winning ones, and doing so across the full range of market conditions that the late 1980s and 1990s produced.
The fact that Proctor retired from managing client capital and now trades only his personal account follows a pattern seen among several of the original Turtles. Managing external capital adds compliance obligations, investor relations, and institutional infrastructure demands that a trader running his own money does not face. A Turtle who proved his approach over years of managing client funds and then stepped back to trade his own account is not abandoning the methodology. He is removing the friction that comes between the trader and the system.
EMC Capital with Liz Cheval
Proctor co-runs EMC Capital Management with fellow original Turtle Liz Cheval. EMC is one of the longest-running Turtle-affiliated managed futures operations, and grew to over $148 million in assets under management. Cheval and Proctor bring the same training from the original Dennis programme to the firm’s systematic trend following approach.
The partnership between two original Turtles running the same firm is a specific expression of what the TurtleTrader experiment produced. Dennis and Eckhardt trained twenty-three traders in the same room with the same rules. The Turtles who succeeded applied those rules through the difficulties that the markets produced over the following years. Cheval and Proctor are among the practitioners who built careers lasting decades from that two-week training, which is the most direct possible proof that the approach Dennis taught was sound and durable.
Training Mark J. Walsh: The Second Generation
Proctor assisted in the development of Mark J. Walsh, a second-generation Turtle who went on to run Mark J. Walsh and Company. Walsh was trained by both Craig Soderquist and Proctor, giving him exposure to two members of the original cohort with independent track records. The involvement of multiple original Turtles in Walsh’s development reflects the way the methodology propagated beyond the original training: practitioner to practitioner, with the rules and the discipline passed along through direct mentorship rather than through academic publication.
Proctor’s contribution to the second generation adds a teaching dimension to his legacy that goes beyond the performance of Pro Trading alone. The original experiment demonstrated that trading could be taught by Dennis. The fact that Turtles like Proctor went on to teach others demonstrates that the knowledge was transferable again, from the first generation to the second, with the core methodology intact.
Frequently Asked Questions About Brian Proctor
Who is Brian Proctor?
Brian Proctor is one of the original TurtleTraders trained by Richard Dennis and William Eckhardt in 1983. He founded Pro Trading, one of the better-performing Turtle firms, and later co-founded EMC Capital Management with fellow Turtle Liz Cheval. He also trained second-generation Turtle Mark J. Walsh. He has since retired from managing client capital and trades only his personal account.
What is Pro Trading?
Pro Trading was Brian Proctor’s systematic trend following CTA, built on the rules he learned in the 1983 Turtle training programme. The firm’s track record placed it among the top-performing Turtle operations over its active years, demonstrating that the Dennis-Eckhardt methodology produced strong results across multiple independent practitioners applying the same foundational rules.
What is EMC Capital?
EMC Capital Management is the systematic trend following firm that Brian Proctor co-runs with Liz Cheval, who was also an original TurtleTrader trained by Dennis. EMC grew to over $148 million in assets under management. Both Cheval and Proctor bring the same foundational training from the original Turtle programme to the firm’s approach.
How did Proctor contribute to the second generation of Turtles?
Proctor assisted in the development of Mark J. Walsh, a second-generation practitioner who went on to found Mark J. Walsh and Company. Walsh also trained with Craig Soderquist, another original Turtle. Proctor’s role as a teacher extended the TurtleTrader methodology beyond the original cohort and demonstrated that the rules Dennis taught could be transmitted again from first-generation to second-generation practitioners.
Trend Following Systems
Want to learn more and start trading trend following systems? Start here.
