In 1987, Larry Williams was already, by trading standards, a senior figure. He had published The Secret of Selecting Stocks in 1970, How I Made One Million Dollars Last Year Trading Commodities in 1973, and was twice the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate from Montana — running in 1978 and again in 1982. By the time he sat down to enter the World Cup Championship of Futures Trading in 1987, he had been trading commodities for two decades and developing technical indicators for over twenty years.
The 1987 result is the one that anchors his place in the canon. Trading Treasury bonds and S&P futures from a $10,000 starting account, Williams produced a net gain of $1,137,607 over the year — peaking above $2.1 million mid-year before drawing back to that close. The 11,376% return remains the all-time record for the World Cup Trading Championships, unmatched in the nearly four decades since.
But the WCTC win is one chapter in a longer story. This is what the rest of the career looks like.
Early life and education
Larry Richard Williams was born October 6, 1942. He graduated from the University of Oregon's School of Journalism in 1964. The journalism background — he says — shapes how he writes about markets: short, declarative, willing to risk being wrong in print. The early career was not in finance; it was in advertising and writing, with trading as a parallel obsession.
By 1966, he had begun developing what would become Williams %R — the momentum oscillator that bears his name and that ships in essentially every charting platform alive today. The indicator measures where the current close sits within a recent high-low range, normalized between 0 and -100, and remains a textbook entry-level momentum tool nearly six decades later.
The 1973 book and what it actually claimed
How I Made One Million Dollars Last Year Trading Commodities (Windsor Books, 1973) covered Williams's 1973 trading year. The book is a 130-page narrative of how he traded that specific year using two systematic methods — Williams %R and a momentum-based approach — applied to commodity futures during one of the larger bull years in commodity history. The framing was deliberate: a documentary record of a real trading year, not a how-to.
The book did two things at once. It established Williams as a public-facing trader (the title alone made it a bestseller in the small trading-book market of the mid-1970s) and it pre-committed him to a verifiable track record. He couldn't quietly disappear after a bad year; the public expected the next book.
Across his career, Williams has authored 11 books. Long-Term Secrets to Short-Term Trading (Wiley, 1998) is among the most widely cited; The Mount Sinai Myth (Carol Publishing, 1990) is one of his ventures outside trading.
The political detour: 1978 and 1982 Senate runs
Williams ran twice for the U.S. Senate as the Republican nominee from Montana — in 1978 against Democratic incumbent Max Baucus, and again in 1982. The 1978 race saw him win the Republican primary with around 62% of the vote, then lose the general to Baucus 56% to 44%. The second campaign also ended in defeat against Baucus.
The trading career didn't pause during the political runs; if anything, the runs gave Williams a higher public profile that compounded with his book sales and seminar circuit. The losses also seem to have reinforced the trader-author identity: he didn't return to politics after 1982 and refocused on trading, indicators, and writing.
1987 — the WCTC win that set the canon
The Robbins World Cup Championship of Futures Trading is run on real-money accounts with audited statements submitted to the championship organizer. Entrants put up their own capital; the championship verifies the audited final balance against the start. There is no simulation, no platform-provided allocation, and no opportunity to selectively report.
Williams entered the 1987 futures division with $10,000 of personal capital. Trading primarily Treasury bonds and S&P 500 futures — leveraged products with significant intraday volatility — he ran the account up to a peak above $2.1 million mid-year before drawing back to a year-end balance of $1,147,607 (a net gain of $1,137,607 from the $10,000 starting capital). The audited 11,376% net return was, and remains, the highest annual return ever recorded in the championship.
The structural properties of the result are why it still anchors the G.O.A.T. canon (covered separately in The G.O.A.T. canon — what it means):
- Real money. $10,000 of his own capital, drawdowns at the $2.1 million peak meant losing real money on the way back to the close.
- Verifiable. Audited account statements with the championship organizer.
- Not a flash. Williams was already 14 years past his first major book, with a continuous public trading record on either side of 1987.
- In live, durable markets. Treasury bonds and S&P futures are still being traded today. The strategies didn't depend on a closed-form regime that vanished after the win.
In the years following 1987, Williams continued to enter the championship at smaller divisions and to participate in the futures trading community as an author, seminar host, and indicator developer.
Indicators, methods, and the COT obsession
Beyond Williams %R, Williams has developed a long list of technical and fundamental indicators that are still in active use:
- Ultimate Oscillator — a momentum oscillator combining three time-period measurements designed to reduce false signals from single-period oscillators
- Williams Accumulation/Distribution — a volume-based indicator distinguishing buying pressure from selling pressure
- COT (Commitments of Traders) indices — Williams was among the early popularizers of using the CFTC's weekly COT report to identify positioning extremes among commercial hedgers, large speculators, and small speculators
The COT angle is distinctive: Williams treats the COT report as a fundamental data source for futures, not a technical signal. The thesis is that commercial hedgers (the producers and processors of physical commodities) are usually right at major turns; tracking their net positioning relative to extremes provides a contrarian-but-fundamentally-grounded edge. Decades after Williams popularized the framework, COT analysis remains a core retail-trader tool — though one whose signal-to-noise has degraded as algorithmic and ETF flows have changed the composition of "commercial" positioning.
Michelle Williams and the second-generation entry
Williams's daughter, the actor Michelle Williams (known for Dawson's Creek, Brokeback Mountain, Manchester by the Sea), entered the Robbins World Cup Championship at age 17. She won her division with a 1,000% return — making her the first woman to win the Robbins WCTC title and the third-highest result in the championship's recorded history (behind her father's 1987 record and a subsequent runner-up). The Williams family's two-generation championship presence is among the most distinctive in the WCTC's history.
That Michelle Williams went on to a film career rather than a trading career is part of what makes the result interesting: the championship is not a feeder system for full-time traders, and a one-time entry from a teenager produced a top-three lifetime placement against multi-decade professional fields.
Position in the canon
Williams's place in the G.O.A.T. canon rests on three criteria, all of which his career satisfies cleanly:
- Verified peak performance under public rules — 1987 WCTC, audited.
- Longevity — six decades of public trading, multiple books across the period, indicators developed continuously.
- Public trail — books, seminars, indicator names, championship presence; everything Williams has done in markets is in print or recorded.
The canon piece The G.O.A.T. canon — what it means treats the 1987 result as the calibration point against which other claimants are measured. The reason isn't the size of the percentage return alone — though 11,376% is striking — but the structural properties: real capital, audited, in durable markets, surrounded by a multi-decade career rather than standing alone as a flash.
What the record means in 2026
Crypto-native trading has produced absolute returns that, in percentage terms, dwarf 11,376%. A trader who runs $1,000 to $1 million on a Solana memecoin position is mathematically running a 100,000% return — nearly ten times Williams's 1987 number. The G.O.A.T. canon does not include those traders, for reasons covered separately in the canon piece: verification gaps, lack of organized contest framework, and limited longevity for a market that has only existed since 2009.
The Williams 1987 record continues to anchor the canon because the structural properties make it durable. A more impressive percentage return inside a less-verified, less-organized, shorter-track-record context is not, by the canon's logic, a higher achievement. This is what makes the canon valuable as a credential — and why a trader's first verified championship placement, even at modest percentages, can be worth more than a self-reported 50,000% gain in absolute reputation terms.
Frequently asked questions
What was Larry Williams's 1987 World Cup Trading Championship return? A net gain of $1,137,607 from a $10,000 starting account, equating to an 11,376% return for the year. The account peaked above $2.1 million mid-year before drawing back to the year-end close. The return remains the highest ever recorded in the World Cup Trading Championships.
What instruments did Williams trade for the 1987 win? Primarily Treasury bonds and S&P 500 futures — both leveraged futures products with significant intraday volatility, both still actively traded today.
What's Williams %R and when did Williams develop it? Williams %R is a momentum oscillator developed by Larry Williams in 1966, normalizing the close price within a recent high-low range to a value between 0 and -100. It's one of the most widely cited momentum indicators in retail trading and ships in essentially every charting platform.
Did Williams have a political career? Yes. He ran twice as the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate from Montana — in 1978 against Max Baucus (losing 56% to 44% in the general election) and again in 1982. He focused on trading and writing after the 1982 race.
Who's Michelle Williams in the trading context? Larry Williams's daughter, the actor known from Dawson's Creek and Manchester by the Sea, entered the Robbins WCTC at age 17 and won her division with a 1,000% return — making her the first woman to win the championship title and the third-highest result in WCTC history.
How many books has Williams written? Eleven, most on stock and commodity trading, including The Secret of Selecting Stocks (1970), How I Made One Million Dollars Last Year Trading Commodities (1973), and Long-Term Secrets to Short-Term Trading (Wiley, 1998).
Last reviewed 2026-05-09 by Vitaly Kaminsky. Submit corrections via the Suggest a change form.