Philip Lu was a Turtle. His firm is Golden Mountain Trading.

Golden Mountain Trading, over the years, has been one of the best performing Turtle-trading firms. However, Lu has retired from trading for clients and now trades only his personal account.

Philip Lu and the 1989 Wall Street Journal Rankings

The 1989 Wall Street Journal article that documented Turtle performance placed Philip Lu sixth in the cohort, with an average annual compound return of 88.9 percent for the period 1985 through 1988 and 36 percent in the first half of 1989. Those numbers put him in the upper tier of the original Turtles, behind Stig Ostgaard, Elizabeth Cheval, Michael Cavallo, Jerry Parker‘s Chesapeake Capital, and Paul Rabar, but ahead of Craig Soderquist, Jeff Gordon, and the remaining cohort.

An 88.9 percent average annual return over three years is not a figure that requires contextualisation. It is the kind of performance that, built on a foundation of systematic trend following rules taught in two weeks by Richard Dennis, raises the same question it raised when the WSJ first published the rankings: how is this possible, and what were these people doing?

The Brown University Turtle

Philip Lu graduated from Brown University. That background made him one of the more academically credentialled members of the original cohort, which included traders from varied backgrounds. The TurtleTrader selection process was not designed to filter for credentials. Dennis and Eckhardt were looking for people who could follow a systematic process with discipline, learn from data rather than from intuition, and hold positions through drawdowns without abandoning the rules. A Brown degree was neither an advantage nor a disqualification. What mattered was the demonstrated capacity to think probabilistically and act under uncertainty without wavering.

Golden Mountain Trading: Performance and Deliberate Scale

Golden Mountain Trading was Philip Lu’s systematic futures trading firm. It was, by the account of TurtleTrader and the 1989 WSJ data, one of the best-performing Turtle firms over its active years. After his client trading career, Lu retired from managing external capital and traded only his personal account.

Fellow Turtles who spoke to Michael Covel during the research for The Complete TurtleTrader noted that Lu was respected by the cohort and that he could have built a firm in the same league as Jerry Parker‘s Chesapeake Capital or Paul Rabar’s operation. The observation about Lu came with a qualifier: he chose not to take on capital beyond a certain level. He did not want to manage a billion dollars.

That choice is worth examining. The managed futures industry’s fee structure creates strong incentives to grow assets under management. Management fees scale with AUM. A fund manager who turns down capital is making a deliberate trade-off between income and the quality of the trading operation. There is a real argument that systematic trend following loses edge as it scales beyond the liquidity available in the markets it trades. Lu’s decision to keep Golden Mountain Trading at a size he could manage without compromising the approach reflects the same philosophy that David Druz articulated for Tactical Investment Management: to be good, not big.

Privacy and the Confidentiality Question

Lu was among the Turtles who declined to be interviewed for The Complete TurtleTrader. When contacted, he raised the confidentiality agreement all Turtles had signed with Dennis. Michael Covel notes in the Myths section of TurtleTrader that that agreement had long since expired and was available online. Lu’s position was his own, based on his interpretation of his obligations to Dennis, rather than a legal requirement.

That stance is consistent with what other Turtles said about Lu: he was respected, he knew the system still worked, and he took the view that wider dissemination of the rules would reduce their effectiveness. The note from fellow Turtle Sam DeNardo is relevant: Lu felt, like many of the Turtles, that the experience of learning to trade under Dennis was something to protect and be grateful for, not something to broadcast. That is a coherent position regardless of the legal status of the confidentiality agreement.

Frequently Asked Questions About Philip Lu

Who is Philip Lu?

Philip Lu is one of the original TurtleTraders trained by Richard Dennis and William Eckhardt in the 1983 Turtle programme. He is a Brown University graduate who founded Golden Mountain Trading, which posted an 88.9 percent average annual compound return from 1985 to 1988 according to the 1989 Wall Street Journal Turtle rankings. He retired from managing client capital and now trades only his personal account. He later worked as a college teacher.

What was Golden Mountain Trading?

Golden Mountain Trading was Philip Lu’s systematic futures trading CTA, built on the trend following rules he learned from Dennis and Eckhardt. The firm’s performance ranked it in the upper tier of the original Turtle cohort through the late 1980s. Lu retired from managing external capital after his active trading career and traded only his own money thereafter.

Why did Lu decline to grow his fund?

Fellow Turtles noted that Lu chose not to take on capital beyond a certain level. He did not want to manage a billion dollars. That decision reflects a philosophy shared by David Druz and others in the trend following world: that a trading operation optimised for robustness and quality is better than one optimised for asset growth. The fee structure of the industry incentivises growth; Lu chose to prioritise the integrity of the trading approach over the income that additional AUM would have generated.

What was Lu’s position on the TurtleTrader confidentiality agreement?

When contacted by Michael Covel during research for The Complete TurtleTrader, Lu cited the confidentiality agreement he had signed with Dennis as his reason for declining an interview. The agreement had expired by that point and was available to anyone who looked. Other Turtles interpreted it differently. Lu’s position was a personal choice reflecting his own view of his obligations to Dennis, rather than a legal one.

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