Why Are They Called the Turtles? Three Origin Stories for the Famous Nickname

Excerpts taken from The Complete TurtleTrader:

That “Turtle” name? It was simply the nickname Dennis used for his students. He had been on a trip to Singapore and visited a turtle-breeding farm. A huge vat of squirming turtles inspired him to say, “We are going to grow traders just like they grow turtles in Singapore.”

…Several Turtles gave different versions of the genesis of the original “Turtle” nickname. Mike Shannon [former turtle] contradicted the legend that Dennis named his students after seeing a turtle-breeding farm in Singapore: “Our original name, in the first year of our existence, was the Disciples. Because it was the name, at the time, of a prominent street gang on Chicago’s West Side, we agreed to go with the ‘Turtle’ idea.” Accurate? No one else told me that story, but then again Shannon had told me many other things that I later confirmed as true that no one else had told me. On the other hand, Lucy Wyatt Mattinen, one of the two female Turtles, said the name actually traced back to Richard Dennis’s fondness for the music of the ’60s pop group The Turtles.

Three Stories, One Name, and What It Tells Us About the Experiment

The three competing origin stories for the Turtle name are a minor mystery compared to the experiment itself, but they reveal something important about how the Turtle story has been transmitted. The Singapore turtle-breeding farm story is the most widely repeated because it is the most vivid: the image of Dennis standing over a vat of squirming turtles and declaring “we are going to grow traders just like they grow turtles in Singapore” is immediately memorable and captures the essence of the experiment’s thesis in a single anecdote. Whether it is literally true is a different question.

Shannon’s “Disciples” story, if accurate, adds a Chicago flavor to the naming that fits the environment: the first class of Turtles were recruited through a want ad in the Chicago newspapers, trained in Chicago, and placed in the Chicago markets in 1984. A name association with Chicago street culture, even one requiring a quick pivot to something more marketable, is entirely plausible in that environment. The fact that no other Turtle confirmed this story is not definitive evidence against it. Shannon had confirmed other unique details that no one else had mentioned.

Lucy Wyatt Mattinen’s account of Dennis’s fondness for the 1960s pop group The Turtles is the most obscure and least verifiable of the three, but it reflects the personal nature of the naming decision. A nickname given informally in the early stages of the experiment might well have been anchored to a personal cultural reference rather than to a dramatic Singapore moment. The group’s most famous song, “Happy Together,” may have captured something about the collegiality Dennis intended for his student trading group.

The three stories are not mutually exclusive. It is possible that the Singapore story was a later framing of a name that had already been chosen for other reasons, or that multiple associations were made by different participants in different contexts. What matters for the trading education record is not which story is literally accurate but what the name came to represent: a specific experiment proving that systematic trading rules could be taught, and a specific group of people whose results documented both the possibilities and limits of that teachability.