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In 1983, Richard Dennis and his partner William Eckhardt were sitting in a restaurant in Chicago arguing. Dennis — a legend of grain futures who had turned $400 in borrowed money into around $200 million — claimed: "Trading can be taught. Whoever has the rules has the edge." Eckhardt disagreed: "It is innate. You need an instinct."

Dennis wanted to prove it. He placed an ad in the Wall Street Journal: seeking trainees with no trading experience. Over 1,000 applicants responded. Dennis chose 23. Among them: an actor, a toy designer, a logistics manager, a security guard, a chess master. He named them after the turtles on a farm in Singapore that he had once visited: the Turtles.

Dennis taught them a strictly mechanical system over two weeks. The foundation was Donchian Channels — simple chart lines marking the highest and lowest high of the last 20 and 55 days. The rule was brutally simple: if the price breaks above the 20-day high → buy. If it breaks below the 10-day low → sell. Position size scaled by volatility. No opinions. No news. No forecasts. Only the chart.

Then Dennis gave each Turtle an account with $1 million. And let them go.

In the following four years, the Turtles collectively made over $175 million profit. The best achieved annual returns of over 100 percent. The chess master later managed a billion-dollar fund. The actor traded billions. Dennis had won the bet.

In 1992, the British pound was pegged to the German mark within the European Monetary System. The Bank of England had committed to keeping the pound above a minimum rate — at whatever cost. George Soros and his chief strategist Stanley Druckenmiller saw something different in the chart: a price creeping ever closer to its floor. A price that the British government could only defend through ever higher interest rates. Interest rates that were strangling their own economy.

Druckenmiller's analysis was classic technical analysis paired with macroeconomics: "The support will break. It's only a question of when." Soros listened. Then he said the sentence that later became legend: "If you are so convinced — why are you holding back? Go for the jugular."

Quantum Fund built up a short position on the pound that ultimately had a notional value of around $10 billion — with leverage. On 15 September 1992, the German Bundesbank raised interest rates — and the British pound began to scratch at support. The Bank of England threw $27 billion in reserves into the market to hold the rate. Soros kept buying pounds, ever cheaper.

On 16 September — "Black Wednesday" — the Bank of England capitulated. It withdrew from the currency system. The pound collapsed. Soros's fund had earned over $1 billion in a single day. The newspapers gave him the title that would forever cling to him: "The Man Who Broke the Bank of England."

Jim Simons was not a trader. He was a mathematician, winner of the Veblen Prize, developer of Chern-Simons theory, former cryptographer for the National Security Agency. In 1978 he founded Renaissance Technologies — but not to hire analysts who read balance sheets. He hired mathematicians, physicists, signal theorists and cryptographers. People who had never listened to an earnings call.

Simons's thesis was simple: the market is not a completely random system. It contains patterns — tiny, brief anomalies that a human eye would never see. But a computer evaluating every tick of every stock since 1959 might. The question was simply: are there statistically robust patterns that repeat?

For years they tried. They rejected hundreds of hypotheses. They found a pattern in the distribution of trading times that nobody could explain — but it worked. They found a relationship between oil prices and pork belly futures that had no fundamental logic — but it worked. They found thousands of such mini-edges. Each one so small that it would not have made any human rich. Together — at hundreds of thousands of trades per year — they produced the Medallion Fund.

From 1988 to 2018 Medallion earned an average of 66 percent per year before fees. Even in 2008, during the financial crisis, it made 80 percent. In 2020, during Covid, 76 percent. Warren Buffett in his best decades was at 20 percent. Medallion is now closed to external investors — Simons and his employees have accumulated a fortune of around $100 billion.

Nobody outside the fund knows what the signals are. Former employees sign lifetime non-disclosure agreements. The only thing publicly known: Renaissance trades almost exclusively from charts. Fundamental data plays almost no role.