World Cup Championship of Futures Trading, 1987: from $10,000 to over $1.1 million in one year, on a verified real-money account — the record stands to this day.
| Period | b. 1942 |
| Lens | Short-term futures trading |
| Eponymous tool | Williams %R |
| Key works | How I Made One Million Dollars… (1973); Long-Term Secrets to Short-Term Trading (1999) |
Who he is
Active since the early 1960s, Williams is the rare educator with a publicly verified result: the 1987 World Cup win with over 11,000% on real money, under the organisers' eyes (his daughter Michelle won the same contest ten years later using her father's techniques). Around that peak, sixty years of operational research: indicators, short-term patterns, government report data, seasonality — always with the obsession of measuring rather than asserting.
Contribution
- Williams %R — a momentum oscillator related to the Stochastic: where price closes relative to the recent range, on an inverted 0/−100 scale.
- The COT as an informational edge — among the first to use the Commitments of Traders report systematically: reading the positions of the commercials (those who actually use the commodity) against the public.
- Seasonality and calendar patterns — days of the month, holidays, expiry cycles: measurable regularities to combine with the technical setup.
- Real-account honesty — real-money contests and inspectable track records: a standard of proof the education industry rarely meets.
What today's students learn from him
- Every idea is judged by its measured expectancy over a sample, not by anecdote: his career is a catalogue of tested hypotheses.
- The +11,376% of 1987 was achieved with contest-grade size: Williams himself recalls that the curve contained ferocious drawdowns — returns are never judged apart from the risk taken.
- Data "outside" the chart (positioning, seasonality) are legitimate technical ingredients, if treated with the same statistical rigour.
Study path
Short-term timing with measurable rules: three steps.
| # | Step | Entry |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Measure the edge | |
| 2 | Oscillators and extremes | |
| 3 | Short macro context |
From Long-Term Secrets to Short-Term Trading: Williams documents short-term patterns (volatility spikes, post-extreme reversals) and %R (a stochastic cousin). Famous campaign: Robbins World Cup win (1987) with documented >10,000% return — study as process, not a replicable promise.
Related concepts
- expectancy · backtest
- position-sizing · drawdown
- stochastic — the cousin of his %R