A Little About Ben & Jerry
Who we are. How we got here. Where we’re going.
Trend and Turtle brings together two very different paths — one rooted in decades of market commentary, the other in four decades of rules-based trend following — united by a shared belief in rules, discipline, and modern systematic trading. Join us as Ben and Jerry revisit the lessons of the original Turtle experiment and explore how those principles apply today.
Trend Following Plus Nothing
The Story Behind Trend and Turtle
What happens when a market commentator stops talking—and starts trading by the rules?
For more than three decades, Ben Lichtenstein built a career explaining markets from the inside. From the trading floors of the CME and CBOT to anchoring daily live market shows on the Schwab Network, Ben’s role was to observe, analyze, and interpret price action in real time.
But commentary is not commitment.
After years of trading alongside broadcasting, Ben made a deliberate break—selling his condo, moving to the Outer Banks, and stepping away from daily television to trade full time. The goal was clear: transition from discretionary, interpretive decision-making to a fully rules-based, systematic approach.
That search led back to one of the most important experiments in trading history.
In the early 1980s, Richard Dennis and Bill Eckhardt set out to answer whether great traders were born or trained. The result was the Turtle Trading experiment, which produced a generation of disciplined trend followers—among them Jerry Parker, who went on to build one of the longest-running trend-following track records in the industry.
Ben reached out to Jerry not for stories, but for structure.
What followed became the foundation of this project: a modern mentorship that revisits the principles of classic trend following—risk first, wide diversification, cutting losses short, and letting winners run—while adapting them to today’s markets.
This project documents that process openly.
Not in hindsight.
Not in theory.
But forward—trade by trade, rule by rule.
There are no predictions here.
No opinions disguised as insight.
Just the work, the discipline, and the willingness to let the system speak.
This is how we got here
Meet Your Hosts
In the series, Ben documents his journey openly—learning, trading, and managing risk in real time under the mentorship of original Turtle Trader Jerry Parker. His role is not to predict outcomes, but to ask the questions, follow the rules, and confront the psychological realities of systematic trading as they unfold.
What People Say
