Quote:
Originally posted by mishak
Yes, the Dennis's test was a good idea.
However I'm not sure if he had proved smth. He ended with 20 hand-picked "students" of 1000 applicants plus 3 guys by recommendation. It is only 2% of people who applied. I wonder how Dennis distributed his advertisement about his program, had everybody in the USA chance to read it and apply? Anyhow, these 2% is much less than percenate of successful traders on forex which is widely considered to be 10%.
The "Trading Places" movie looks more "pure" experiment for me 
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Mishak,
Surely you are joking. I think your comment about trading places was the tip off. Nonetheless if you are serious here are my comments:
Dennis only interviewed 80 of the 1000 applicants and chose to train only 20 percent of the ones he interviewed. That in no way implies that the non-selected 980 would all have failed. To imply that the 980 failed is to imply that the entire rest of the world of non-successful traders also failed for they too were not selected having been filtered out by time, space, availablity, and a host of factors to incredible to document. So really if we were to use your argument Dennis' group were only .0000000005 percent of the population. What then is the point? Also what is the point of your comment about it representing only 2 percent of forex traders? By far the majority of the Turtles were not traders.
No mentor could train all applicants. There had to be a selection process and Eckhardt who took the other side of the bet had no problem with Dennis' selection procedure in the context of the bet. Dennis bet was to prove that trading could be taught and that it wasn't genetic. William Eckhardt agreed he won the bet because he was able to train a less than random percentage of the people he selected. He had no genetic isolation techniques in his selection process nor did he have any basis to determine genetic predisposition to trading. Also the bet was not to determine whether ANYONE could be taught trading as was the bet in the move trading places. The bet was simply to determine if trading could be taught.
Getting back to the thread however, you responded with a point that I don't really think was related to my point and that of this thread which was to discuss the ideal mentor. I think it was pretty clear that from a learners point of view Dennis built some pretty compelling motivational factors into his trading/mentoring plan. The turtles themselves testifiy to the fact that they had it easy because Dennis actually made it a lot harder to break the rules than to obey. Again my question would be:
Who here would turn down an opportunity like that if it was offered?