Jeff Gordon was a Turtle. His firm is Gordon Financial Services. Gordon Financial Services, over the years, has been one of the best performing Turtle-trading firms. However, Gordon has retired from trading for clients and now trades only his personal account. Gordon also assisted in the development of second generation Turtle Mark J. Walsh.
An Attorney Who Answered the Ad
Jeff Gordon was an attorney and small business owner when he saw Richard Dennis‘s newspaper advertisement in 1983. The ad invited applicants to be trained in Dennis’s trading methods and trade his capital for a share of the profits. About a thousand people responded to each version of the ad. Dennis and William Eckhardt selected twenty-three. Gordon was among them.
The description of Gordon from The Complete TurtleTrader places him in the group plainly: an educated, non-finance professional who recognised the opportunity and acted on it without hesitation. He later reflected that everyone in the financial world wanted to trade like Richard Dennis and that the ad represented a genuine path to doing that. Firing off his application was, in his words, a coincidental and fortuitous life-changing decision he made in a heartbeat.
On Bill Eckhardt
Gordon was one of the Turtles who spoke with the most candour about the importance of William Eckhardt to the experiment’s success. When Michael Covel was researching The Complete TurtleTrader, Gordon was emphatic: “Bill [Eckhardt]. Very smart guy. It seemed like every time he spoke, I learned something. And there are very few people in the world that I have ever met that I can say that about.”
That assessment captures something important about how the Turtle programme worked in practice. Most public accounts of the experiment focus on Richard Dennis as the teacher and driver of the experiment. The Turtles themselves pushed back on that framing and argued that Eckhardt’s contribution was equal and in many ways more intellectually demanding. Dennis provided the trading philosophy and the capital. Eckhardt provided the rigour, the mathematical framework for risk management, and the psychological depth that the training required.
Gordon Financial Services: Performance That Stood the Test
Gordon Financial Services became one of the best-performing Turtle firms over its active years. The 1989 Wall Street Journal article documenting Turtle performance placed Gordon’s average annual return at 41.8 percent over the relevant period, with strong range across good and bad years. That track record placed him at the upper end of the Turtle cohort and demonstrated that the rules Dennis and Eckhardt taught in two weeks in 1983 could be applied with discipline to produce returns that held up over years of varied market conditions.
Gordon retired from managing client money and moved to trading his personal account is itself a statement about how he thought about the business. Many of the successful Turtles faced the same transition: the infrastructure required to manage outside capital, the regulatory environment, and the pressure of client relationships all add friction to a systematic trading operation. Trading a personal account removes those frictions and allows the system to run without the non-trading demands that institutional money management places on a trader’s time and attention.
Mentoring the Second Generation
Gordon’s role in assisting the development of second-generation Turtle Mark J. Walsh is a direct continuation of the experiment’s founding logic. Dennis and Eckhardt demonstrated that a systematic trend following approach could be taught. The Turtles who went on to teach others extended that proof to a second generation. The knowledge spread not through academic papers but through direct mentorship between practitioners, which is how trading knowledge spreads best.
The TurtleTrader experiment produced not just a cohort of profitable traders but a lineage. Gordon is part of that lineage as both practitioner and teacher. His choice to pass the approach forward to Walsh ensured that the methods Dennis and Eckhardt developed in Chicago in the early 1980s continued to shape how systematic trend following was practised into the following generation of the industry.
Frequently Asked Questions About Jeff Gordon
Who is Jeff Gordon the trader?
Jeff Gordon is one of the original TurtleTraders trained by Richard Dennis and William Eckhardt in 1983. He was an attorney and small business owner before being selected for the programme. He founded Gordon Financial Services, which became one of the best-performing Turtle trading firms. He later retired from client trading and trades only his personal account. He also mentored second-generation Turtle Mark J. Walsh.
What was Gordon Financial Services?
Gordon Financial Services was Jeff Gordon’s trend following CTA, built on the systematic trading rules he learned from Dennis and Eckhardt in the 1983 Turtle training programme. Over its active years it produced returns that ranked it among the top performing Turtle firms, with average annual returns documented at 41.8 percent in the 1989 Wall Street Journal analysis of Turtle performance.
What did Gordon say about William Eckhardt?
Gordon was among the Turtles who most emphasised Eckhardt’s contribution to the programme. He told Michael Covel that Eckhardt was one of the very few people he had ever met from whom he was learning something every time they spoke. He and other Turtles pushed back on accounts that presented Dennis as the sole teacher, insisting that Eckhardt’s intellectual contribution was central to what made the training work.
How does Jeff Gordon connect to the broader TurtleTrader story?
Gordon is part of the TurtleTrader lineage at both ends. He was selected from a thousand applicants to receive Dennis’s training, became a top-performing Turtle, and then helped pass the approach forward by assisting in the development of second-generation Turtle Mark J. Walsh. His career spans the full arc of the experiment: from the original selection, through the trading years at Gordon Financial Services, to the mentorship that extended the methodology beyond the original cohort.
Trend Following Systems
Want to learn more and start trading trend following systems? Start here.
