William Eckhardt: The man who launched 1,000 systems.
Bill Eckhardt: By trying to improve your system you can make it worse.
Eckhardt admits in The New Market Wizards that he was wrong
and Dennis was right;
Eckhardt believed that exceptional trading came from within
and that it could not be taught.
Bill Eckhardt: The random walk model of price
change has been so durable because it's nearly correct.
In addition to building trading systems, Eckhardt has developed a science of trading
and written academic papers on the philosophy of science.
In a recent interview with Managing Editor Dan Collins,
legendary trader William Eckhardt talked about the battle between optimization and curve fitting.
According to a tape that Shawn Eckhardt had recorded early in the planning stages,
there was even a suggestion that Kerrigan be murdered.
When Bill Eckhardt left the University of Chicago
and foresook his nearly completed PhD in mathematical logic in 1973, he did not abandon his educational pursuits;
Eckhardt challenged Dennis's belief that trading could
be taught to anyone by saying that he thought trading success was more of an innate thing that could not easily be taught.
In 1983, two commodity traders, Richard Dennis and Bill Eckhardt, got into a heated debate on whether being a good
trader was a product of genes or if it could be taught.