Anthony “Tony” Saliba is the only options trader Jack Schwager chose to profile in the original Market Wizards. That distinction is not a footnote. The book featured the most consequential traders of a generation, and Saliba was the sole representative of an entire asset class, derivatives, whose complexity and opacity had kept most practitioners invisible to the broader public. His inclusion was a signal: the principles that produced excellence in systematic futures trading, the domain of the Turtles, also appeared in the options pits of the Chicago Board Options Exchange, expressed differently but rooted in the same disciplines of risk control, patience, and the willingness to stay in trades that were working.

Saliba was not a Turtle. He did not train under Richard Dennis or William Eckhardt, and his methodology, built around options spreads, volatility exploitation, and position management through the Greeks, is technically distinct from the breakout trend following the Turtles were taught. But the character of his trading, his capacity to recognize rare asymmetric opportunities, his discipline under extreme market stress, and his insistence on always having protection in place, describes the same psychological orientation that Dennis was trying to identify when he ran the Turtle experiment. Excellence in markets is recognizable across styles.

Caddying for Grain Traders: How It Started

Saliba grew up in the Chicago area and attended Highland Park High School, where he competed in wrestling, track, and cross country. His first exposure to trading came through caddying for grain traders as a teenager. He watched how they thought, how they talked about markets, and what kind of life the job produced. That early proximity planted a seed that would determine the rest of his career.

After graduating from Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business in 1977 with a degree in accounting, he took a job as a stockbroker at a small firm in Indianapolis. A friend had asked if he wanted to be a broker, and Saliba had assumed it meant doing what the grain traders he had caddied for were doing: buying and selling on an exchange floor. When he arrived in Indianapolis and realized the job was telephone sales, the mismatch was immediate. He asked the right question fast: who makes all the money in this business? The answer he got sent him to Chicago.

The $50,000 Grubstake and the CBOE Floor

Saliba arrived at the Chicago Board Options Exchange as a clerk in 1979. On the floor, he ran into one of the grain traders he had caddied for years earlier. That encounter produced the opportunity that changed his trajectory. The terms were direct: Saliba contributed his accumulated trading knowledge, his former client provided $50,000 in capital. It was enough to get started.

The grubstake model is a recurring structure in trading history. Michael Marcus received backing from Ed Seykota. The Turtles traded Dennis’s money. Saliba’s arrangement was similar in structure: an established participant recognized something in a younger trader and provided the capital to test it. The asymmetry of these arrangements, where the backed trader has everything to gain and limited downside, and the backer has the capital risk, requires a calibrated assessment of character from both sides. Saliba evidently had what the grain trader saw.

He bought out his partner as soon as he could and began building independently. By 1987, eight years after arriving as a clerk, he had 27 traders working under him and had been elected to the CBOE’s Board of Directors, a position he held until 1990.

Seventy Consecutive Months of Profitable Trading

The headline statistic from Saliba’s trading career is 70 consecutive months of profitable options trading, a streak that speaks to something more than raw performance. Seventy months is nearly six years. Across that span, markets moved through multiple regimes, interest rate cycles, earnings seasons, and volatility environments. Sustaining profitability through all of it, without a losing month, required not just good strategy selection but exquisite risk management and the psychological capacity to stay disciplined when trades moved against position.

The streak ended. All streaks do. But the architecture that produced it, understanding volatility deeply enough to position for asymmetric outcomes, maintaining protection at all times, and cutting positions that were not behaving as expected, remained the foundation of everything Saliba built afterward.

Teledyne, the 1987 Crash, and Asymmetric Positioning

Two episodes defined Saliba’s public reputation as a trader. The first was a Teledyne position that turned into a windfall. He had accumulated call options when news broke that Teledyne was announcing a stock repurchase at $200 per share. The stock was trading around $155 when trading was halted. When it reopened, Saliba’s $180 calls were dramatically in the money. The stock eventually traded to $300. He made millions overnight. The setup combined deep understanding of options valuation with the discipline to hold a position through uncertainty, a combination most traders talk about but fewer execute consistently.

The second episode was the October 1987 crash. Saliba had been building protection ahead of what he anticipated would be a large move, though he did not know which direction. He constructed a butterfly spread combined with out-of-the-money puts and calls in the back months, an architecture designed to profit from a volatility explosion regardless of direction. When the market collapsed on Black Monday, the protection paid. His observation about that week captures something essential about his philosophy: a trader once told him that in stealing second base, you never take your hand off first until your other hand is on second. He always had insurance.

That instinct for protection is the options trader’s version of the Turtle stop-loss rule. The specific mechanics are different: a trend follower exits a losing position when price moves against the entry by a defined amount; an options trader structures the position so that maximum loss is known in advance. But the underlying logic is identical. You must define and limit downside before you can let upside run. Both approaches embody the same truth about risk management that every practitioner who survives long enough eventually internalizes.

The Humility Behind the Discipline

Saliba’s Market Wizards interview is notable for its emphasis on the psychological traps that destroy floor traders. His observation about the traders who get blown out is direct: they think they are bigger than the market. They lose their fear of the marketplace, and with it their discipline and work ethic. The market does not care about your record, your reputation, or your confidence. It will take the money of anyone who stops paying attention to what it is actually doing.

That humility, the recognition that the market is always larger than any individual participant, is a recurring theme across the traders profiled on this site. Seykota expressed it through the concept of the market as teacher. Paul Tudor Jones kept a reminder about losing on his desk. Eckhardt built it into the Turtle curriculum through his concept of memory-less trading: you should not care how you got to your current position, only what the right action is now. Saliba arrived at the same place through a different path. The destination is always the same.

Building Institutions: ITI, LiquidPoint, and the Entrepreneur Phase

Saliba’s career after the CBOE floor expanded in a direction few pure traders take: institution building. In 1989 he founded International Trading Institute, a derivatives training institution that built the first options simulator and went on to train professional traders and market makers across more than 22 countries. The ITI represented a commitment to transmission: the same impulse that led Dennis to run the Turtle experiment, the belief that trading knowledge can be taught to those with the right disposition and the discipline to apply it.

In 1992 he founded Salibaco, a floor-based firm that trained and financially backed young traders, extending the grubstake model that had launched his own career. In 1999 he founded LiquidPoint, a trading platform and broker that grew into a significant technology operation before being sold to ConvergEx Group in 2007 for a mid-nine-figure sum. That exit placed Saliba in a different category than most trading careers produce: a practitioner who built institutional value that could be monetized independently of his own trading results.

He also co-founded Efficient Capital Management, a managed futures firm, connecting his options expertise to the broader systematic trading world that includes the Turtle legacy. His subsequent ventures, Matrix Execution Technologies, Fortify Technologies, and others, reflect a pattern of applying trading-derived insight about risk, systems, and execution to adjacent domains.

Managing Expectations and the Transmission of Knowledge

Saliba’s book Managing Expectations: Driving Profitable Option Trading Outcomes through Knowledge, Discipline, and Risk Management codified the trading philosophy he had developed across four decades. The title is instructive. Managing expectations is not about pessimism or caution for its own sake. It is about aligning your behavior with what the market can actually deliver, rather than what you wish it would deliver. Traders who approach positions with unrealistic expectations about speed, magnitude, or certainty tend to hold losers too long and exit winners too early, the same behavioral pattern that the Turtles’ systematic rules were designed to override.

In 2019 he received the U.S. Options Lifetime Contribution Award, recognized by the options exchanges and the OIC as one of the first recipients of that distinction. It was an acknowledgment not just of his trading record but of what he built around it: the educational institutions, the technology platforms, and the mentorship network that shaped a generation of derivatives practitioners.

What Saliba Adds to the Trend Following Picture

The turtletrader.com project is not exclusively about commodity futures or systematic breakout systems. It is about the principles that produce durable excellence in markets. Saliba’s career illuminates several of those principles from an unusual angle. His asset class requires a different technical vocabulary, but the strategic logic converges with the Turtle framework at every important juncture: define risk before entry, maintain protection, exploit asymmetric setups, and stay disciplined enough to execute the plan when the market is moving violently in any direction.

The 1987 crash is the most instructive example. When most market participants were experiencing catastrophic losses or paralysis, Saliba’s pre-positioned protection turned the event into a significant gain. That outcome was not luck. It was the product of a framework that assumed large moves were always possible, always insured against them, and was positioned to benefit when they materialized. Bill Dunn, John W. Henry, and the other great trend followers had similar experiences during the crash: their short positions captured the move because they were already positioned by the system, not because they predicted the event. The method matters more than the forecast.

Original Content from TurtleTrader

I was a caddy for some grain traders when I was in high school. In college, a friend of mine asked me if I would like to be a broker. I thought that he meant doing the same thing as the guys I had caddied for. So, I said, Yes. Great! Where? Indianapolis, he answered. I said, What exchange is in Indianapolis? None, he said, you do it on the phone. I had this impression of: Hello New York, buy; Chicago, sell. When I got there, I found out I was a salesman. After a few months, I asked the guys in the office, Who makes all the money in this business? They said you have to be on the floor. Right there I decided to go to the Chicago Board Options Exchange. On the floor, I met one of the traders I had caddied for years ago, and he grubstaked me with $50,000.

Anthony J. Saliba has been a pioneer and active participant in the Chicago derivatives markets for over 20 years. He holds exchange memberships on the Chicago Board Options Exchange (serving on the Board of Directors from 1987 to 1990), The Chicago Board of Trade, and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. His list of current professional endeavors include: CEO of Saliba Portfolio Management, L.L.C., a portfolio management firm providing state-of-the-art investment enhancement techniques through the use of derivatives; Founding Member of Saliba Partners, L.L.C., an options trading firm on the floor of the CBOE; Chairman/Founder of International Trading Institute, Ltd., an internationally renowned derivatives training institution; and Founder/Partner, First Traders Analytical Solutions, N.A., a system solution provider for front and middle office trading, pricing and risk-management systems for the electronic trading of options.

Frequently Asked Questions

Was Tony Saliba a Turtle trader?

No. Saliba was not part of the Turtle experiment run by Richard Dennis. He built his career independently as an options market maker at the CBOE starting in 1979. His inclusion on this site reflects the convergence of his core disciplines with those the Turtles were taught: strict risk management, asymmetric positioning, and the psychological discipline to execute a plan under extreme market stress.

What made Tony Saliba unique in Market Wizards?

Saliba was the only options trader profiled in the original Market Wizards (1989). Every other trader in the book operated primarily in stocks, futures, or currencies. His inclusion signaled that the principles of exceptional trading apply across asset classes, not just in the systematic futures strategies more commonly associated with the trend following tradition.

What was Tony Saliba’s 70-month streak?

Saliba achieved 70 consecutive months of profitable options trading, nearly six years without a losing month. The streak was produced by his discipline in managing volatility exposure, maintaining protective positions at all times, and exploiting asymmetric setups where potential gains significantly exceeded potential losses.

What is the International Trading Institute?

The International Trading Institute (ITI) was founded by Saliba in 1989. It built the first options trading simulator and has trained professional traders and market makers across more than 22 countries over more than three decades. It represents Saliba’s commitment to transmitting trading knowledge, similar in spirit to the Turtle program’s goal of demonstrating that great trading can be taught.

What happened to LiquidPoint?

Saliba founded LiquidPoint in 1999 as a trading platform, broker, and technology solutions provider. In 2007 it was sold to ConvergEx Group for a mid-nine-figure sum, one of the more significant exits in the derivatives technology space during that period. Saliba remained as an executive managing director at ConvergEx until 2014.

Trend Following Systems
Want to learn more and start trading trend following systems? Start here.