Larry Williams: The 11,376% Record Holder, Fact-Checked

In 1987, Larry Williams started with $10,000 and finished the year with an official return of 11,376%, more than $1.1 million. In a single year, with real money, under the rules of a contest. That number still stands as the record of the World Cup Championship of Futures Trading, and it is the reason his name appears in almost every book on short-term trading.

It is also the reason for stubborn legends. Williams is surrounded by numbers nobody has ever checked and claims that fall apart when you do the math. I have traded since 1980 and have seen his methods on the chart for decades. So in this article I separate what is documented from what is only repeated often.

You will learn how his trading approach works, which two patterns of his are still traded today, what is known about his net worth and why the criticism of him is justified. My verdict is at the end, and the FAQ answers the most common questions. This article follows our editorial policy.

Larry Williams in 30 seconds

• Record still unbeaten: Williams won the 1987 Robbins World Cup Championship with 11,376% and turned $10,000 into more than $1.1 million.
• Not a pure chartist: he combines fundamentals, charts and the positioning of the commercials in the COT report.
• Two patterns carry his name: the Oops pattern against opening gaps and the volatility breakout beyond the previous day’s range.
• The family trades too: his daughter Michelle Williams, today known as an actress, won the same contest in 1997.
• The weak spot: the record year is a single event he never repeated, and he has never published a multi-decade track record.

Who is Larry Williams?

Larry Richard Williams is an American futures trader, author and course provider who won the 1987 Robbins World Cup Championship of Futures Trading with a return of 11,376%, the highest result in the history of the contest.

Williams was born on October 6, 1942, in Miles City, Montana, which makes him 84. He graduated from the School of Journalism at the University of Oregon in 1964. He has no background in economics.

Besides trading, Williams was active in politics. He was the Republican nominee for the US Senate in Montana in 1978 and 1982 and lost both times. This double role still shapes how he presents himself: he does not only sell a method, he sells a story.

The contest that made him famous has its own guide. If you want to know how the World Cup Trading Championship works and who else has won it, you will find the winners and the rules there.

Not to be confused: Bill Williams is a different trader. He developed the Alligator indicator. Both names often appear together in search results, but their approaches have nothing in common.

Full name	Larry Richard Williams
Born	October 6, 1942, Miles City, Montana
Education	University of Oregon, School of Journalism, 1964
Markets	commodity futures, stock indices, stocks
Best-known achievement	won the 1987 Robbins World Cup Championship, 11,376%
Best-known indicators	Williams %R, Ultimate Oscillator, COT indices
Best-known patterns	Oops pattern, volatility breakout
Website	ireallytrade.com

Larry Williams’ trading career

Williams started watching the futures markets long before he traded them. According to his own account, he only began trading after years of pure observation. That alone contradicts the image of the natural talent.

He started with pure chart analysis: moving averages, trendlines and chart patterns. By his own account he lost half his capital with it. After that he threw away what he had read and started his own research.

It took him several more years to become consistently profitable. Anyone who expects to make money after three months of trading should remember that.

The breakthrough came in 1987 with the win at the Robbins World Cup Championship. $10,000 became more than $1.1 million. Williams calls the contest the turning point of his career, and not only because of the profit: the title made him known around the world and laid the foundation for the seminars and books he still offers today. How the record compares with long-term track records is in our ranking of the best traders in the world.

His trading approach

Larry Williams’ approach is technical-fundamental swing trading: fundamentals decide which market he trades, and the chart decides entry and exit.

It is a mix of fundamental and technical analysis, applied as swing trading. He usually holds his positions for two to three days, sometimes longer. His platform is Trade Navigator from Genesis Financial Technologies, the same software we have worked with for years.

What the commercials in the COT report reveal

Williams’ real fingerprint is the third ingredient: the positioning of the commercials. These are the market participants who actually produce or use a commodity and hedge on the futures market. Williams calls them the superpowers of the market.

The reason is simple. Commercials are the best capitalized players, and through their business they know what is really happening in their market. Their positions appear in the Commitments of Traders (COT) report, which the US regulator CFTC publishes every Friday. It shows the positions as of the previous Tuesday.

The rule Williams draws from this is deliberately simple: he buys when the commercials buy and sells when they sell. The chart then only provides the timing.

A word on expectations: the COT report is weekly data with a three-day delay. It is useful for the big picture, not as an entry signal. If you treat it like an indicator, you will be disappointed.

The Oops pattern

The Oops pattern is a reversal setup by Larry Williams that trades an opening gap against its own direction once price returns into the previous day’s range during the session.

The pattern owes its name to the brokers of the 1970s. When the market gapped overnight and clients were stopped out, the phone call started with the words “Oops, we lost”.

The logic behind it: an opening gap is often an overreaction to news. If price then runs back into the old range, the reaction was exaggerated.

• Long: the market opens below the previous day’s low. The buy order sits just above that low and only becomes active when price gets there.
• Short: the market opens above the previous day’s high. The sell order sits just below that high.

The second half of each rule is what matters. You do not buy the gap itself, only the return into the previous day’s range. If price stays outside, there is no trade. This filter makes the pattern usable, and it is exactly the part most retellings leave out.

My view after more than four decades on the chart: the setup works best where gaps are rare and therefore meaningful. That means futures with clear trading hours. In the 24-hour forex market there are hardly any real gaps, so the pattern runs into the void. How opening gaps behave in general is covered in our guide to gap trading.

The volatility breakout

A volatility breakout according to Larry Williams is a breakout setup in which the entry level is today’s open plus or minus a fixed share of the previous day’s range.

The idea comes from physics, and Williams describes it exactly that way. A market that suddenly moves further than usual behaves like a body set in motion. It keeps going until an opposing force appears.

In practice: measure the previous day’s range from high to low, take a share of it and place it above and below today’s open. If one of these two levels trades, that is the entry. The share is the real adjustment knob and has to be chosen per market. A factor that works in crude oil produces only false signals in the Bund future.

The price of this approach is high. Breakout systems typically have many small losses and few large gains. If you cannot bear a run of false breakouts, you quit just before the trade that would have saved the result.

Larry Williams’ indicators

Williams has developed a whole range of his own indicators over the years. By far the best known is Williams %R, which is still built into almost every charting package.

• Williams %R: an oscillator that measures overbought and oversold phases.
• Ultimate Oscillator: combines three time windows in one line to dampen the typical false signals of short oscillators.
• Williams VIX Fix: recreates the volatility shock of the VIX for markets that have no volatility index of their own.
• COT indices: for commercials, large speculators and small speculators, they put the current positioning in relation to its historical range.
• Seasonal and cycle forecasts: seasonal and cyclical studies for commodity markets.

Williams publishes the full overview with the calculation logic as a PDF on his website.

The holy grail of trading?

So is Larry Williams’ approach the holy grail of trading? No, there is no holy grail. What Williams has is a real but limited edge, and he gets it with comparatively little time spent. That is worth a lot, and still something completely different from a money machine.

The 1987 performance remains a single event. That his approach basically works shows more in the fact that several later top finishers learned from him. Few copied him one to one. They took inspiration and added their own nuances, and that is how knowledge is passed on in trading.

Williams has shaped a whole generation of COT traders. One of his students is the German futures trader Maxim Schulz, whom I know personally. He finished third in the 2017 futures contest of the same championship and teaches the COT approach today.

Larry Williams’ net worth: what the numbers show

There is no reliable source for Larry Williams’ net worth. Estimates online are in the tens of millions of dollars, but Williams has not confirmed them and they cannot be checked against published figures.

That is the honest answer to one of the most common questions about him. If you read a specific amount online, you are reading an estimate without evidence, passed from site to site.

What is documented is his business model. Alongside his trading, he has offered seminars, courses, software and books for decades, as his own website shows. How his income splits between teaching and trading is not public.

Michelle Williams, the second champion in the family

A misunderstanding persists here, so once clearly: the actress Michelle Williams and the 1997 trading champion are the same person. She is Larry Williams’ daughter, born in 1980.

In 1997, as a teenager, she entered the Robbins World Cup Championship and turned $10,000 into about $110,000. That is a return of about 1,000%, ten years after her father’s record.

She then turned to acting, where she made her fortune. That is why her name comes up in trading circles and in Hollywood at the same time, one of the most unusual careers this contest has produced.

Larry Williams’ books

Williams has written around a dozen books. The titles that matter for traders:

• Long-Term Secrets to Short-Term Trading: the standard work, which describes the Oops pattern, the volatility breakout and his money management.
• The Right Stock at the Right Time: more focused on stocks and cycles.
• Trade Stocks and Commodities with the Insiders: his book on the COT report.
• How I Made One Million Dollars Last Year Trading Commodities: the early work that built his reputation.

If you read only one, read Long-Term Secrets to Short-Term Trading. That is where the method is. Everything else adds to it.

Criticism of Larry Williams

Larry Williams has many critics, and in my view their criticism is justified. So that this does not turn into a hatchet job, here are both sides.

What speaks for Larry Williams

• Real money: the 1987 win took place with real money under contest conditions, not on paper.
• Open methods: his methods are clearly described in his books, not hidden in a black box.
• Transferable: several later top finishers learned from him.
• Consistent: he has worked on the same basic ideas for more than six decades without chasing every fashion.
• Lasting tools: Williams %R is still part of practically every charting package.

What speaks against him

• No repeat: he never won the contest again, and a single record year proves little about lasting skill.
• Teaching as a business: for decades he has sold courses and books alongside his trading, so his public image is also a marketing asset.
• Tax case: he was convicted of three tax misdemeanors in 2010, which is part of the public record.
• Unproven wealth: circulating net worth estimates are unproven, and he does not comment on them.

The core objection fits into one sentence: whoever achieved such a performance over many years would have the proof as the strongest marketing tool of their life. That such long-term proof is missing is no small thing.

The tax case against Larry Williams

For completeness, and because a lot of false information circulates, here is what the court record shows. A federal grand jury in the Southern District of California indicted Williams on three counts on April 11, 2006 (United States v. Williams, case no. 3:06-cr-00787). He was arraigned in November 2008 after a long fight over his extradition from Australia, as NPR’s Planet Money reported, and pleaded not guilty.

On February 5, 2010, the fifth day of his jury trial, the case was settled. Williams pleaded guilty to three misdemeanor counts in a superseding information; according to his own book and press reports, they concerned filing his tax returns late for 1999 to 2001. On April 27, 2010, the court dismissed the three original counts and sentenced him to time served, one year of supervised release and a $50,000 fine. A misdemeanor plea is not a felony conviction for tax evasion.

Larry Williams today: courses, forecasts and a warning

At 84, Williams is still active. Through his website ireallytrade.com he offers webinars, a course series called Larry Williams University and an annual forecast report that, by his own account, traders in more than 67 countries follow.

More important than the offer is a warning he gives on his own home page. Williams writes that he does not take part in social media, apart from a rarely used YouTube channel linked there, and that many people falsely claim he personally mentored them. Anyone who sells coaching, signals or fund shares in his name via Instagram, Telegram or WhatsApp is not acting with his confirmation.

This is not a side issue. Famous trader names are a common front for investment fraud, and the bigger the legend, the more attractive the abuse. If someone contacts you unsolicited as “Larry Williams” or claims to act for him, treat it as a likely scam and check the identity only through the contact details on his official website.

The core of his teaching: loss control

Williams is famous for a profit number, but what he has taught above all is limiting losses. In his books and seminars he describes trading as a business of damage control: before every trade, he decides how much of his money he is willing to lose if it turns out to be his worst trade ever. That is the part of his teaching quoted least often, and the most useful one. How to put it into practice is in our guide to risk management.

My verdict on Larry Williams

My personal assessment: Williams has earned a real edge in the market, but the 1987 result alone does not prove a multi-decade trading record.

Like practically all well-known trading coaches, he sells his knowledge. I do not know a single trader who provably belongs to the top one percent and would be willing to share their edge. Whoever has such a large advantage rarely gives it away, and seldom has the time for all the marketing around it.

My reading of the 11,376% is accordingly sober: besides being a real result, it was a great promotion, for Williams and for the contest alike.

And still, fairness demands this: his approach can beat the market, and several people have shown that over a very long period. Whoever reads the books gets an honestly described method and no black box. That is more than you can say about most providers in this business.

Frequently asked questions about Larry Williams

Who is Larry Williams?

Larry Richard Williams is an American futures trader, author and course provider, born in 1942 in Montana. He became famous in 1987 by winning the Robbins World Cup Championship of Futures Trading with a return of 11,376%.

How does Larry Williams trade?

He trades a technical-fundamental swing trading approach. Fundamentals and the positioning of the commercials in the COT report decide what he trades, and the chart gives entry and exit. He usually holds positions for two to three days.

What is Larry Williams’ Oops pattern?

The Oops pattern trades an opening gap against its own direction. If the market opens below the previous day’s low and returns into the previous day’s range during the session, that is a buy signal. For a gap above the previous day’s high, the rule works the other way round.

What is Larry Williams’ net worth?

There is no reliable source. Figures in the tens of millions of dollars are estimates without evidence, neither confirmed by Williams nor verifiable. Alongside trading, he has sold seminars, courses and books for decades.

Is Michelle Williams Larry Williams’ daughter?

Yes, the actress Michelle Williams is his daughter. She won the Robbins World Cup Championship in 1997, turning $10,000 into about $110,000. It is the same person, not two people with the same name.

Which Larry Williams book should you read?

Long-Term Secrets to Short-Term Trading. It covers the Oops pattern, the volatility breakout and his money management in one place. All other titles add to this work.