If the trader G.O.A.T. canon's anchor for "peak single-year performance" is Larry Williams's 1987 World Cup record, and the anchor for "system-driven repeatability" is Andrea Unger's four WCTC wins, the anchor for longevity across regimes is Linda Bradford Raschke.
Raschke's career covers four decades — equity-options market-making in the 1980s, registering as a Commodity Trading Advisor in 1992, founding LBRGroup, running multiple funds across the 1990s and 2000s, taking the Granat Fund to a top-20 BarclayHedge five-year ranking out of approximately 4,500 hedge funds, retiring from institutional CTA/CPO roles in 2015, and continuing as a private-account trader and educator into the present. The career arc is what makes the record canonical: not a single peak year but sustained, publicly-visible performance across multiple full market cycles.
This is the story.
Background
Linda Sue Bradford was born March 15, 1959 in Pasadena, California. Her father, Robert Bradford, was a stockbroker — the financial-markets exposure was familial from early on. She attended Occidental College, where she studied economics and music composition, graduating in 1980.
The dual major (economics + music composition) is more relevant to the eventual trading career than it might appear. Music composition trains a specific kind of pattern-recognition and structured improvisation: how to recognize when a pattern is repeating versus when it's about to shift, how to operate within a defined harmonic framework while making real-time decisions about the next move. Several traders have noted that musical training translates surprisingly well to discretionary tape-reading, where the same pattern-recognition + framework-execution combination is what produces consistent results.
1981-1992 — the options pit years
Raschke entered professional trading in 1981 as a market maker in equity options. She held memberships on the Pacific Coast Stock Exchange and subsequently on the Philadelphia Stock Exchange — the two major U.S. options floors of that era. Market-making in equity options at that time meant being on the floor, posting two-sided quotes, and managing inventory through real-time hedging across volatility, delta, and time-decay dimensions.
The 1980s options-floor environment is where Raschke's edge developed. The skills required — fast volatility analysis, arbitrage execution, risk management on a moving book — became the structural foundation of every later phase of the career. The market-making years also gave her a deep tape-reading foundation: when you're posting quotes that someone else can hit, you learn very quickly how order-flow tells you which way price is about to move, and how to read intent from volume profile and the timing of trades.
By the late 1980s, equity-options market-making was being squeezed by electronic trading and tighter spreads. Raschke's transition to off-floor trading was both a personal choice and an industry-driven evolution.
1992 — registering as a CTA and founding LBRGroup
In 1992, Raschke registered as a Commodity Trading Advisor (CTA) and founded LBRGroup, Inc. The CTA registration was the formal regulatory step that allowed her to manage client capital in commodity-futures markets — broadening from the equity-options floor into futures, currencies, and the broader CTA-eligible product set.
The same year, Jack Schwager published The New Market Wizards: Conversations with America's Top Traders — a follow-up to his 1989 Market Wizards. Raschke was one of the traders profiled in the new volume. The chapter is one of the most candid in the Market Wizards series about what professional discretionary trading actually feels like at championship level — including the psychological dimension that's often glossed over in trading-strategy books.
The New Market Wizards feature was the public-facing entry of Raschke into the trader canon. From 1992 forward, she operated at the intersection of professional money-management, public-facing teaching, and continued personal trading — a combination that few traders sustain across multi-decade timescales without one of the three components dropping off.
1996 — Street Smarts and the educator chapter
In 1996, Raschke co-authored Street Smarts: High Probability Short-Term Trading Strategies with Laurence A. Connors. The book is a methodology-focused trading text that documents specific short-term setups — including the now-widely-known "Turtle Soup" trade, a pattern that fades the breakout-of-recent-range setups that the original Turtles used. Street Smarts remains in active circulation in the trading-education space and is cited across decades of subsequent trading books and courses.
The publication of Street Smarts completed a transition that started with the New Market Wizards feature: from "championship-level professional trader" to "championship-level professional trader who also teaches publicly." The teaching arm has been part of the career ever since, alongside the institutional money-management track.
1998-2015 — the fund years
Raschke's institutional-fund career spans roughly 1998 through 2015:
- 1998: Watermark Fund — Cayman-domiciled fund launched with Laura Bondurant.
- 2002: LBR Asset Management — established as a Commodity Pool Operator (CPO).
- The Granat Fund — global-futures fund focused on risk-adjusted returns and drawdown management. Ranked 17th out of approximately 4,500 hedge funds for five-year performance by BarclayHedge in the late 2000s.
The BarclayHedge ranking is the structural credential of this period. A top-20 placement out of ~4,500 hedge funds, on a five-year window, is a statistical achievement the canon takes as decisive evidence of sustained edge — five years is long enough to clear regime changes, large enough to average out luck, and the ranking is computed by an independent third party rather than self-reported.
In 2015, Raschke retired from her institutional CTA and CPO roles. She continues to trade her own account and to teach publicly through interviews, courses, and her website, but the formal money-management chapter of the career closed at that point.
2018 — Trading Sardines memoir
In 2018, Raschke published Trading Sardines: Lessons in the Markets from a Lifelong Trader — a memoir blending personal anecdotes with market lessons drawn from the four decades of trading. The book is the first-person account of the career arc, including the floor years that aren't well documented elsewhere and the psychological dimension of running a multi-decade trading practice through the inevitable losses and recoveries.
The title's reference is to an old Wall Street story about sardines — markets where everyone is buying not because they want to eat the product but because they expect to sell it to someone else (i.e. trading sardines, not eating sardines). The framing is characteristic of Raschke's voice: structurally clear-eyed about market mechanics, with a willingness to name what's actually happening rather than dressing trading up as something cleaner than it is.
2024 — Lifetime Achievement Award
In 2024, the International Federation of Technical Analysts (IFTA) presented Raschke with its Lifetime Achievement Award for contributions to technical analysis and trader education. The award is one of the highest-prestige public recognitions in the technical-analysis professional space and serves as the canonical industry acknowledgment of the four-decade career.
Position in the canon
By the criteria the G.O.A.T. canon applies (covered separately in The G.O.A.T. canon — what it means):
- Verified peak performance under public rules — top-20 BarclayHedge five-year ranking out of ~4,500 hedge funds; 1992 New Market Wizards feature; consistent multi-decade public visibility.
- Longevity — four decades from 1981 floor entry through current private trading; spans the 1980s options-floor era, the 1990s CTA-era growth, the 2000s hedge-fund boom, the 2008 crisis, the 2010s post-crisis recovery, and into the present.
- Public trail — New Market Wizards (1992), Street Smarts co-author (1996), Trading Sardines memoir (2018), IFTA Lifetime Achievement Award (2024), continuous public-facing teaching and interview presence.
Raschke's distinctive contribution to the canon is the longevity criterion — applied at a level few traders sustain. Williams's 1987 record is anchored by a single year. Schwartz's 1984 USIC win is anchored by the championship + the Pit Bull memoir + the post-1985 fund work. Unger's four WCTC wins span 2008-2012. Raschke's record covers 1981-present — over four decades of public-facing professional trading, with verified institutional performance and continued teaching activity.
What the record means today
For a modern trader, the Raschke career is the working answer to "is it possible to sustain championship-level trading for an entire career, or do all good runs end?" The record argues that yes, sustained excellence over decades is achievable — but the path requires a specific combination: deep technical foundations (the options-floor years built that), institutional-grade risk management (the Granat Fund's drawdown focus is part of the BarclayHedge ranking story), willingness to teach publicly (which seems to keep the discipline sharp by forcing articulation), and willingness to evolve with market structure changes (1980s floor to 1990s electronic to 2000s globalized futures to today's HFT-dominated environment).
That combination is rare. Raschke's record is canonical because she's one of the few who has demonstrated it.
Frequently asked questions
What's Linda Raschke's most cited achievement? The Granat Fund's top-20 BarclayHedge five-year hedge-fund ranking (out of approximately 4,500 funds) in the late 2000s. The figure is the structural anchor of her institutional-trader credibility — a five-year independently-ranked performance that's a meaningful credential beyond any single-year championship win.
Was Linda Raschke part of the original Turtles? No. Raschke is sometimes adjacent in trading literature to the Turtle Traders era because of timing, but she was not part of Richard Dennis's Turtle program. She independently developed her trading approach through floor market-making in equity options at the Pacific Coast and Philadelphia exchanges starting in 1981.
What's "Turtle Soup"? A short-term reversal pattern documented in Street Smarts (1996, co-authored with Larry Connors). The pattern fades breakouts of the type the original Turtles followed — it's named to indicate that the strategy "eats" the breakout setups that the Turtles relied on. It's one of the most-cited patterns from Street Smarts.
Where can I read Raschke's first-person account of her career? Trading Sardines: Lessons in the Markets from a Lifelong Trader (2018) is her memoir. Earlier, the New Market Wizards (Schwager, 1992) chapter is the first major first-person feature. Street Smarts (Raschke + Connors, 1996) is methodology-focused rather than memoir but contains career-context anecdotes throughout.
Is Raschke still actively trading? Yes — she retired from her institutional CTA / CPO roles in 2015 but continues to trade her own account and to teach publicly. Her website and interview presence remain active in 2026.
How does Raschke's record compare to the male canonical traders? Raschke's record is one of the longest sustained at the top tier — comparable to Williams in tenure but with a different shape (institutional fund management rather than direct championship participation). The canon treats her as one of the four primary reference points alongside Williams, Schwartz, and Unger, with longevity the criterion her record anchors most cleanly.
Last reviewed 2026-05-09 by Vitaly Kaminsky. Submit corrections via the Suggest a change form.