Larry Williams🇺🇸

Larry Williams is the most decorated competitive trader in the history of futures markets. Born in Miles City, Montana in 1942, he started trading commodities in the late 1960s while working in advertising, and by the mid-1970s had become a full-time speculator. He is the creator of two indicators that became standard parts of every charting package — the Williams %R momentum oscillator and the Ultimate Oscillator — and the author of more than a dozen books on speculation, including "How I Made One Million Dollars Last Year Trading Commodities" (1973) and "Long-Term Secrets to Short-Term Trading" (1999). His defining moment came in the 1987 World Cup Championship of Futures Trading, where he turned a $10,000 entry account into $1,137,600 over twelve months — a 11,376% net return that remains the highest result ever posted in the championship's four-decade history. The trade book that produced it was concentrated in S&P 500 futures and bonds, executed largely with cycle and seasonality models he had been refining since the early 1970s. A decade later, in 1997, his daughter Michelle Williams entered the same WCTC futures championship at age 17 and won, posting roughly a 1,000% return. That father-daughter sequence — both winning at age 17 and at maturity respectively — has no precedent in any trading competition before or since. Williams remains an active educator through ireallytrade.com, where he runs trading seminars and publishes weekly market commentary. In a 2017 conversation with Better System Trader, he framed his approach this way: technical analysis matters, but only as a way to express a fundamental view about cycles in supply, sentiment, and money flow. "Indicators are not the trade. The trade is what the market is doing — indicators help you measure it." He is also one of the most cited examples in academic studies of survivorship bias in trading competitions, partly because his result is so far above the second-place finishers that purely random explanations have been formally tested and rejected.