The following extract is a Top Traders Unplugged summary of a conversation between the podcast hosts Niels and Alan with Jerry Parker, Founder of Chesapeake Capital.
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Click on this link to hear the Podcast
Jerry Parker is one of the most significant figures in the history of systematic trend following. He was a member of the original Turtle Traders, trained by Richard Dennis and William Eckhardt in the early 1980s in one of the most celebrated experiments in trading history. He founded Chesapeake Capital in 1988, and has traded it continuously for over three decades, building one of the longest validated track records in the industry.
Parker’s contribution to the trend following conversation extends well beyond his track record. He is one of the most articulate and consistent advocates for what he calls classic trend following: a disciplined, patient, diversified approach that treats the strategy’s occasional long periods of underperformance not as a flaw to be engineered away, but as the structural cost of positioning for the outlier returns that define long-run performance. His adoption of the Outlier Hunter framing, which originated here at ATS, reflects his alignment with the complexity science perspective on why trend following works.
In his conversation with Niels and Alan as part of the 2023 Miniseries, Parker covers the evolution of Chesapeake Capital, his views on what has changed and what has not in trend following over four decades, and why he remains convinced that the simple, robust approach is superior to the increasingly complex variants the industry has produced. For anyone who has read The Fractals of Finance, hearing Parker discuss these ideas in his own voice is an essential companion.
Related reading: Read: Predator and Prey: The Evolutionary Arms Race in Markets