Chicago is the third most populated city in the USA. It is famous for authoritative gangsters, such as Al Capone, rise of jazz and the outstanding jazz performers, such as King Oliver, and also for the first human-made nuclear chain reaction by Enrico Fermi.
Richard J. Dennis was also born in Chicago. This name tells little to ordinary people but among traders, almost every market participant knows Dennis.
After school Richard started to work and spent his first wages on stock trading. But already at the age of 25 he fully returned all the lost money, having made his first million.
“Prince of the Pit” was the young trader’s nickname. Due to his reputation and outstanding trading success, the freshly minted millionaire founded the investment fund Drexel Fund.
Dennis became really popular after his experiment with teaching people to trade from the very beginning. One of Richard’s students, Curtis Faith, told about the experiment in details. Following that training experiment, Faith wrote the book “Way of the Turtle: The Secret Methods that Turned Ordinary People into Legendary Traders”.
Search for individuality
In the early eighties stock exchanges were the field for the elite, not everyone could enter and blend in the raging sea of traders, who literally shouted out the deals. The action took place in a “pit”, a trading hall under a digital billboard with creeping lines of quotes. For his experiment, Richard Dennis recruited twenty people, knowing nothing about trading, and was trained them for two weeks. Then he gave them a month of “free floating” when they were trading on their own. Some of the students managed to follow their teacher's example and fill up their trading account for a million, some people got small deposits, and some people disappeared from the exchange and never became richer.
That was individuality that “The Prince of the Pit” looked for in his students. Dennis thought that anyone could study a trading concept of any complexity, what is far more difficult is to change a philistine's thought process to the mentality of a trader.
All people are unique and come to Forex with their own character traits, but the originality of their style is formed due to training and trading.
Forming a trading style
A trader’s first steps in Forex form all his further trading. Wrong training forms features which subconsciously influence the trading style. To get rid of them in future will be rather difficult.
Strategies with positive results benefit to the forming of a trading style and, on the contrary, loss-making deals have a negative influence on the further working style.
Psychologists see a direct link between the temperament and the trading style. The knowledge, obtained during the training, and experience are adopted through the prism of the trader’s character traits. Psychologists recommend beginners, before they start online trading, to compare their character traits with the individual qualities, a successful trader should have.
Classification of temperaments:
- sanguine – trades actively and emotionally, don’t dwell on failures;
- melancholic- inactive, easily gets stressed;
- choleric – emotional, short-tempered, prefers aggressive trading;
- phlegmatic – trades carefully, with a cool head even in case of negative results.
Emotions and self-control as the core of the trader’s success
If a trader is overwhelmed by emotions even the most experienced teacher won’t help. Changes on the deposit will be a real torture for a trader who is taken over by such emotions as greed, fear of losses, euphoria because of successful trading. These emotions hinder the traders’ success and put them on the wrong way, leading to inevitable bankruptcy. On the contrary, the following qualities and skills will help you to succeed not only in trading but also in life. They are:
- the ability to set the target and reach it
- organization
- stamina
- self-possession
- self-discipline
- confidence
- courage
P.S. Did you like my article? Share it in social networks: it will be the best "thank you" :)
Useful links:
- I recommend trying to trade with a reliable broker here. The system allows you to trade by yourself or copy successful traders from all across the globe.
- Use my promo code BLOG to get a 50% deposit bonus on the LiteFinance platform. Simply enter this code in the appropriate field when funding your trading account.
- Telegram chat for traders: https://t.me/litefinancebrokerchat. We are sharing the signals and trading experience.
- Telegram channel with high-quality analytics, Forex reviews, training articles, and other useful things for traders https://t.me/litefinance

The content of this article reflects the author’s opinion and does not necessarily reflect the official position of LiteFinance broker. The material published on this page is provided for informational purposes only and should not be considered as the provision of investment advice for the purposes of Directive 2014/65/EU.
According to copyright law, this article is considered intellectual property, which includes a prohibition on copying and distributing it without consent.









