Forex turtle trading

Checked October 2026

Turtle System 1 buys a 20-day high and sells a 20-day low, and exits on a break the other way of the last 10 days. Curtis Faith wrote the rules up in 2003. Backtoast ran System 1 on dollar pairs. This version failed our test, losing 3.8% a year over 125 trades.

Backtoast

You pay $99 for two full tests of your own strategy, and a pass is an offer of 30% of the profit Backtoast makes trading it with its own money.

Forex turtle trading

The stop is two N from the entry, where N is the average daily range over 20 days, and each unit is sized so a move of one N costs 1% of the account. The Turtles traded currencies as futures, the Swiss franc, Deutschmark, pound, French franc, yen and Canadian dollar.

The published rule skips a breakout after a winning one and adds a unit every half N. The run took every 20-day breakout and held one unit per pair. Turtle trading is the same System 1 on 11 futures, which is a separate test.

Inside day breakout is the other breakout rule on dollar pairs here.

When it works

Breakout rules make their money when a currency trends for months, usually on a central-bank rate cycle, and give it back in range-bound stretches, where 20-day breaks tend to reverse. It made +0.24% a trade in the last six months of our run, against a small loss per trade before that. System 2's 55-day breakout trades less and skips more false breaks, and a draft can test that before you spend a full test.

Origins

The Original Turtle Trading Rules, put out on OriginalTurtles.org by Curtis Faith and others, report about 80% a year compounded over four years in the mid-1980s, self-reported and across all markets. The run traded the euro, sterling, yen, Swiss franc and Canadian dollar against the dollar, from late 2021 to October 2026.

The run is Backtoast's, from 29 October 2026, after costs.