Ed Seykota
Edward Arthur Seykota
🇺🇸United States
Wrote the first computerized trend-following system on punched cards in 1970 — and has spent every decade since refusing to be famous about it.
Seykota was born in 1946, graduated from MIT in 1969, and joined a major brokerage firm in 1970. There, he developed one of the first commercial computerized systems to assist trading futures — punched-card-driven trend-following models that ran on the firm's mainframes. He left after the firm's management refused to act on the system's signals, set up on his own, and proceeded to compound a single client account at returns that — by the figures cited in Jack Schwager's Market Wizards (1989) — turned a $5,000 starter account into $15 million over 16 years. Schwager named him in the original Market Wizards volume; the chapter is still cited as the canonical introduction to trend following as a discipline.
Beyond the trading, Seykota built the Trading Tribe — a method and a community he started in 1992 for working on the emotional and psychological side of trading. The Trading Tribe Process (TTP) is the body of work he is most-publicly identified with today. His seykota.com FAQ archive — answered personally — runs for decades and is the closest thing to a long-form public interview series with him. He currently trades from a private office (most-cited as Texas, with earlier years in Lake Tahoe / Incline Village, Nevada) and trades only his own money and that of a few selected long-standing clients.
For trading-tournaments.com, Seykota is treated as a Hall-of-Fame profile rather than a contactable modern trader. He has consistently refused public-media interviews for decades; the public material is the FAQ, Schwager's chapter, and a small number of academic-style pieces. He has never entered a public trading championship and would almost certainly refuse one — which is itself a fact the directory should document.