Ed Seykota

Edward Arthur Seykota (born August 7, 1946) is a commodities trader, who earned S.B. degrees in Electrical Engineering from MIT and Management from the MIT Sloan School of Management, both in 1969. In 1970 he pioneered Systems trading by using early punched card computers to test ideas on trading the markets. Seykota resided in Incline Village, Nevada, on the north shore of Lake Tahoe, but recently moved to Texas. 2Career As a young man he attended high school near The Hague, Netherlands and also lived in Voorburg. 3Trading methods Seykota is a trader who in 1970 pioneered a computerized trading system (now known as System trading) for the futures market for the brokerage house he and Michael Marcus were working for. Later, he decided to venture out on his own and manage a few of his client's accounts. Much of Seykota's success was attributed to his development and utilization of computerized trading systems to which he first tested on a mainframe IBM computer. Later on, the brokerage house he had been working for adopted his system for their trades. His interest in creating a computerized system was spawned after he read a letter by Richard Donchian on utilizing mechanical trend following systems for trading and also Donchian's 5- and 20-day moving average system. He was also inspired by the book Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Edwin Lefèvr