Larry Williams (trader)
Larry R. Williams is a stock and commodities
trader and
technical analyst. He was also an author of several books on those subjects, of which many are best sellers (see
Bibliography for details). His daughter
Michelle Williams is an actress.
Larry Williams has his own website and teaches people to trade by holding many seminars, courses, newsletters etc. He is lecturing throughout the world.
He has served on the board of the
National Futures Association representing his fellow Commodity Trading Advisors.
He doesn't believe chartists and is against traditional pattern recognition. Chartists say patterns like triangles, double bottoms etc. are reliable as charts display the supply and demand of both parties, in which the patterns are the outputs of people's psychology and behaviour. However he ironically points out he could also find similar chart patterns in weather chart, crime rate graph etc. which has nothing to do with demand & supply.
He likes to use indicators very much and has developed different indicators including:
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Williams %R*
Ultimate OscillatorLarry Williams is a graduate of the
University of Oregon, with BS in
Journalism.
In
1982, he gained prominence as a stock market genius when he published one of his best-selling book titled "How to Prosper in the Coming Good Years". It accurately forecast the largest bull market and surge of economic growth the
United States has ever seen,. The book was written at a time when the majority of pundits were calling for slowdown in economic growth and stock market, which is exactly the opposite of what Williams forecast.
In
1987 Williams astounded the world again in the
Robbins World Cup Trading Championship by turning US$10,000 into US$1,100,000 over 12 months, although Williams was once ahead more than US$2,000,000 before a losing streak took nearly US$1,000,000 off his winnings. That was, incidentally, long after his
1979 book
How I Made $1,000,000 Trading Commodities Last Year.
His daughter actress
Michelle Williams, at age 16, used what Williams taught and won the same competition with exactly 1000% returns on her US$10,000 investment in
1997.
[Larry Williams page at Global Investor] As of
2006 Williams' 100-fold gain is by far the highest in that competition (ahead of a number of roughly 10-fold gains, including his daughter whose gain is just the third highest).
[World Cup Trading Standings page at Robbins Trading Company website]Nevertheless from
1986 to
1988 he also unsuccessfully ran a fund due to the market crash in
1987. The
Robbins World Cup title has been suspected by some to have possibly been a manipulation of merged accounts. This is because his personal account in
1987 was up while the managed money was down. Many have suspected that this could have been due to assigning profitable trades to his personal account and unprofitable trades to the managed account.
Larry Williams responded to the critics that many clients still made a substantial amount of money in his fund during that time, although much winnings were given back in the
1987 market crash. He commented the critics about cheating in the
Robbins World Cup Trading Championship as the most ludicrous allegations. He questioned, "If I would've known which trades were going to be losing trades why would I've taken them to begin with?" What's more, readers should note that the
Robbins World Cup Trading Championship is regulated by both
National Futures Association and
Commodity Futures Trading Commission. They would not allow them to publish untruthful results, if found.
[Larry Williams - In Response to Critics]Larry Williams and
Robert Cornuke once embarked on a journey to confirm the Bible as historically accurate and detailed their findings in the book
In Search of the Mountain of God: The Discovery of the Real Mt. Sinai and a DVD called
Mountain of Fire where they document the real Mount Sinai.
In
1998, he received Futures Magazine First Doctrine of Future Award.
In
1999, he received Omega Research Lifetime Achievement Award.
In May
2006 he was arrested in Australia and is currently awaiting extradition to the USA for tax evasion. He firmly denied that he has any involvement in tax avoidance schemes of any sort. The jury is still out on how his reputation will survive these recent challenges
[Market guru Williams granted $1M bail] [Cloudy forecast for futures trader]. Some on message boards are now joking that he should own the domain name www.ireallyevade.com
(Partial)
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How I Made $1,000,000 Trading Commodities Last Year, Windsor Books, 3rd edition, 1979, ISBN 0930233107
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How to Prosper in the Coming Good Years, Regnery Gateway, 1982, ISBN 0895266679
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The Secrets of Selecting Stocks for Immediate and Substantial Gains, Windsor Books, 2nd edition 1986, ISBN 0930233050
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Long-Term Secrets to Short-Term Trading, Wiley, 1999, ISBN 0471297224
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Day Trade Futures Online (Wiley Online Trading for a Living), Wiley, 2000, ISBN 0471383392
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The Right Stock at the Right Time: Prospering in the Coming Good Years, Wiley, 2003, ISBN 047143051X
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Larry Williams web site
