Larry Williams: The 11,376% Record That Has Stood for Nearly 40 Years

In 1987, a Montana journalist-turned-trader named Larry Williams entered the Robbins World Cup Championship of Futures Trading with ten thousand dollars of his own money. Twelve months later, he walked away with one million, one hundred and thirty-seven thousand, six hundred dollars. A return of eleven thousand, three hundred and seventy-six percent. In a single year. With real money. In a live trading competition watched by the entire futures industry.

That number, 11,376%, has stood as the all-time record in the World Cup Championship of Futures Trading for nearly forty years. It has never been beaten. Not by Larry Williams himself in subsequent attempts. Not by any of the thousands of traders who have entered the championship since. Not by his own daughter, the actress Michelle Williams, who won the same contest ten years later in 1997 with a remarkable but comparatively modest one thousand percent return. Not by his most successful students, including Andrea Unger who has won the championship three times, with returns of 240%, 115%, and 672% in his best years.

Eleven thousand three hundred and seventy-six percent. The number is so large it strains belief. Williams himself has said in subsequent interviews that he could have ended the year at twenty thousand percent had he not pulled risk off near the end. He pulled risk off because, by then, he had already proven the point.

This is the story of Larry Williams. The journalism graduate from Miles City, Montana who began trading in 1962 and has not stopped. The man who created the Williams %R indicator in 1966, before most modern trading software existed. The first futures trader to use the Commitment of Traders report systematically. The author of eleven books on trading. The teacher whose students have won the World Cup championship across multiple decades. The trader who, after sixty years on the desk, is still active, still publishing annual market forecasts, still teaching.

Also: the man who once locked horns with the IRS, narrowly missed prison for tax issues, and pleaded guilty in February 2010 to three misdemeanor counts of failing to file timely tax returns. The honest version of his story has to include all of it.

Miles City, Billings, and the University of Oregon

Larry Richard Williams was born on 6 October 1942 in Miles City, Montana, a town of approximately eight thousand people in the eastern part of the state. His parents were Sylva Berthea Williams and Richard Sigwart Williams. He grew up in modest circumstances and showed early talent in writing and athletics.

He attended Billings High School in Billings, Montana, graduating in 1960. There he was on the all-state football team and served as sports editor of the school newspaper. The journalism interest was real. He went on to the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism, graduating in 1964. While at Oregon he was a member of Alpha Delta Sigma, an honorary professional fraternity, and served as its national president. He later funded a six-figure scholarship at the University of Oregon in honor of his college professor Max Wales, restricted to journalism and communication students who have demonstrated creative talent but may not have the highest grade point average.

The path from Oregon journalism graduate to all-time record holder in futures trading is not the obvious one. Williams himself has said his interest in markets began in the early 1960s, partly inspired by the Kennedy steel price rollback and partly by curiosity about how prices actually moved. He started trading stocks in 1962, before he had any formal training in finance. By the mid-1960s he was studying commodity markets seriously. The journalism training turned out to be useful in unexpected ways. He could read primary documents carefully, organize information logically, and write clearly enough to teach what he was learning.

The Williams %R and the early indicators

In 1966, Williams created what he called the Williams %R indicator. The %R was a momentum oscillator designed to identify overbought and oversold conditions in markets. The math was simple but the insight was sharp. Compare the most recent close to the high-low range over a defined lookback period, and you get a single number between 0 and -100 that tells you where price is relative to recent volatility. Values near 0 mean the market is near its recent highs. Values near -100 mean it is near its recent lows. The applications for swing trading and reversal identification are obvious.

The Williams %R is now standard in every charting platform on the planet. TradingView. MetaTrader. ThinkOrSwim. NinjaTrader. eSignal. Every one of them ships with the indicator pre-installed. Most traders who use it have no idea who Larry Williams is. The indicator has long since outlived public awareness of its creator.

The Williams %R was the first of a long list. Over the following decades, Williams created the Ultimate Oscillator, the Commitment of Traders indices, accumulation/distribution indicators, cycle forecasts, market sentiment measures, and value measurements for commodity prices. He also wrote the first ever book on seasonality in stock and futures markets, Sure Thing Commodity Trading: How Seasonal Factors Influence Commodity Prices, published in 1987.

What separates Williams from many indicator creators is that he actually trades the indicators he creates. He does not write tools and then sell them while running a different system in his own account. The seasonality work, the COT work, the momentum oscillators are all part of how he actually trades and has traded for sixty years. The credibility comes from the fact that the live results match the published methodology.

The COT pioneer

Williams’ most consequential analytical innovation, even more than the Williams %R, may be his systematic use of the Commitment of Traders report. The COT report is a weekly publication by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission that reports the aggregate positioning of three categories of traders in regulated futures markets: commercial hedgers, large non-commercial speculators, and small speculators.

For most of the 1970s and early 1980s, the COT report was treated by the futures community as background economic data, not as a tradeable input. Williams was the first major trader to argue that the report contained directly tradeable information. The reasoning was structural. Commercial hedgers are usually the most informed participants in any specific commodity market because they actually use the underlying physical product. When commercial positioning reaches an extreme, it is providing information about where the smart money expects prices to go.

Williams developed a series of COT indices that normalized commercial positioning across time and made it possible to spot extremes systematically. The indices became central to his trading. The 1987 World Cup result was, by his own subsequent description, partly a function of having the COT framework in place when most of his competitors did not.

The COT framework has since become a standard tool in futures trading. Most modern futures traders who use COT data are working with frameworks that descend, directly or indirectly, from the work Williams did in the 1970s and 1980s. The intellectual leap of treating publicly available data that everyone else ignored as a primary input to trading decisions is the kind of move that compounds over a career.

The 1987 World Cup

The Robbins World Cup Championship of Futures Trading was established in 1983 as the unofficial world championship of futures trading. Traders enter with a minimum of ten thousand dollars in real money, trade live for twelve months, and the highest percentage return wins. The competition has been held continuously since.

Williams entered the 1987 contest with ten thousand dollars and won with a return of 11,376%. The dollar amount: $1,137,600. He turned the original ten grand into over a million in twelve months of live, audited, real-money trading.

The mechanics of how he did it have been discussed by Williams in subsequent decades. The strategy was a combination of his existing toolkit applied with aggressive position sizing. He used the COT framework to identify directional setups. He used seasonality to identify timing windows. He used technical indicators including his own Williams %R for entries and exits. And critically, he scaled position size as the account grew. The compounding curve was the result.

One detail that gets less attention is what Williams has said about the end of the year. With the championship effectively won and the account well over the million-dollar mark, he reduced position size dramatically and stopped pressing for additional gains. He has said in subsequent interviews that he could have ended the year at twenty thousand percent or higher had he kept the leverage on. He chose not to. The record was already set. Adding additional return at the cost of additional risk would have been ego, not edge.

This is the part of the 1987 story that most retail traders miss when they look at the headline number. The 11,376% was not produced by reckless leverage applied throughout the year. It was produced by aggressive sizing on high-conviction setups, combined with the discipline to step away from additional risk once the goal had been reached. The discipline component is often invisible in the result but is the difference between winning the World Cup and blowing up trying to.

The teaching legacy

Williams wrote his first major book in 1979: How I Made One Million Dollars Last Year Trading Commodities. The title referenced an earlier million-dollar year, not the 1987 World Cup. The book is still in print and has sold continuously for over forty-five years.

His other major works include The Definitive Guide to Futures Trading Volumes I and II (1988), Long-Term Secrets to Short-Term Trading (Wiley 1998), and Trade Stocks and Commodities With the Insiders: Secrets of the COT Report (Wiley 2005). Most of his books focus on actual trading methodology, with concrete setups, indicator construction, and risk management rules. The teaching is unusually transparent for a successful trader. He shows the work.

The student record is what makes the case for Williams as a teacher rather than just a trader. Andrea Unger has won the World Cup Championship three times, with 672% in 2008, 115% in 2009, and 240% in 2010. Michael Cook won in 2007 with 250% and again in 2014 with 366%. Brady Preston finished second in 2010 with 193.2%. Chuck Hughes, Kurt Sakaeda, John Holsinger, and Steve Garner have all been World Cup winners and all studied under Williams. His daughter Michelle Williams won the contest in 1997 with 1,000% return, ten years after her father set the record.

The student-success record is rare in trading education. Most trading educators have weak student outcomes because they are teaching frameworks that worked in narrow market conditions or that depend on personality traits the student lacks. Williams’ frameworks are durable enough that students who internalize them can produce world-class results in their own accounts under their own conditions.

The IRS history

An honest profile of Williams has to engage with his tax history directly, because it is part of the public record and it shaped a real period of his career. In the 1990s, Williams stopped filing federal income tax returns. His public position at the time was that the income tax law contained ambiguities that, in his reading, did not require him to file. He has subsequently described this position as naive in retrospect.

The IRS investigated. The case was protracted. Williams was eventually charged with three counts of tax evasion related to tax years 1999, 2000, and 2001. He faced a serious risk of significant prison time. He was extradited to face the charges and went to trial.

On 5 February 2010, the IRS dropped the three felony tax evasion charges in exchange for Williams pleading guilty to three misdemeanor counts of failing to file income tax returns on time for those three years. He paid the back taxes plus penalties and interest. He served no prison time. The case closed.

The episode is uncomfortable, and Williams has been remarkably direct about it in subsequent interviews. In 2018 he appeared on the NPR economics podcast Planet Money to discuss the tax protest, the extradition, and the trial in his own words. He acknowledged that his original reading of the law was wrong, that the underlying compliance obligations were clear, and that the position he took had real costs to himself and his family. The honesty of the public reckoning is itself unusual.

For working traders, the lesson here is mundane but important. The fundamentals of professional trading include filing your tax returns, paying your taxes, and treating regulatory compliance as part of the operational infrastructure of being a trader. Williams’ case is a reminder that even brilliant traders can make catastrophic non-trading decisions. The career survived the case. Many careers in similar circumstances would not.

The Supreme Court win

One element of Williams’ career that gets less attention than it deserves is his role, alongside Glen King Parker and Bob Prechter, in a U.S. Supreme Court case that ended the forced registration of financial publishers with the SEC and CFTC. The case established that financial publishers writing about markets were exercising First Amendment speech rights and could not be required to register as investment advisers if they were not providing personalized advice.

The win was significant for the entire industry of financial publishing, including newsletters, websites, books, and educational content. Most modern trading education companies, this one included, operate under the legal framework that case helped establish. Williams’ contribution to the legal infrastructure of trader education is, in the long view, possibly more consequential than any single market call.

The conditional trader

Williams calls himself a “conditional trader.” The framework is one of his clearer pedagogical contributions. The idea is that trading decisions should be made conditional on the broader context, not in isolation. You do not just look at a chart pattern and trade it. You ask: under what conditions does this pattern actually work? Are those conditions present right now?

The conditions Williams looks at most carefully are the COT positioning data, seasonal patterns, broader cyclical structures, and market sentiment indicators. If those conditions are aligned with a directional thesis, then specific technical setups become high-conviction trades. If the conditions are mixed or inverted, the same technical setups should be passed.

The structural insight is that no single technical setup works in all market regimes. A breakout that works beautifully in a bull market with healthy commercial positioning will fail in a bear market with extreme commercial selling. The conditional framework is how you avoid trading the right pattern in the wrong environment.

This is the same insight that drives multi-strategy diversification at institutional scale, just applied at the level of individual trade selection. The math is the same: edge is conditional, and the trader who recognizes the conditions has a structural advantage over the trader who treats every setup as if it works in all environments.

What Williams means for your trading practice

Williams’ career maps onto Mind, Method, Money in ways that translate directly to retail traders, partly because he himself has spent sixty years deliberately translating institutional concepts into language and frameworks accessible to working traders.

Mind. Confidence comes from process, not results. The 1987 World Cup record was the result of running a well-tested process aggressively when conditions were right. Williams did not approach the contest hoping to get lucky. He approached it with a framework he had been refining for twenty-five years and applied it with confidence. The mental capacity to trust your own work, even when the position sizes are aggressive, is what separates traders who can deploy edge from traders who cannot.

Method. Combine fundamentals, sentiment, technicals, and seasonality. Williams’ frameworks have always been multi-input. He did not build a single-indicator system because he understood that no single input captures the full picture. The COT data tells you about positioning. Seasonality tells you about historical timing. Technical indicators tell you about momentum and reversal points. Sentiment tells you about crowd psychology. The trader who synthesizes across all four has a more complete picture than the trader who focuses on one.

Money. Run stops. The Williams quote that gets repeated most often by his students is direct: “Markets are always right, you won’t be, so run stops.” The point is that being wrong is part of the process. The question is not how to avoid being wrong. It is how to limit the cost of being wrong so that the trades where you are right can pay for the trades where you are not. The math underneath is the risk-of-ruin arithmetic that governs every trading account. Stop placement is the single most consequential discipline in implementing it.

The last word

Larry Williams is eighty-three years old. He still trades. He still publishes annual market forecasts that are followed by traders in over sixty countries. He still teaches. He still updates his frameworks as markets evolve. The career began in 1962 and has not stopped.

The eleven thousand three hundred and seventy-six percent record stands. The Williams %R is in every charting platform. The COT framework he pioneered is in standard use across the futures industry. His students have won the World Cup championship multiple times across multiple decades. His daughter is an Oscar-nominated actress who, between Hollywood roles, won the same contest he won. His son wrote a respected book on the psychology of winning traders. The teaching legacy is durable.

The IRS case is real and uncomfortable. Williams himself has said it was the result of bad legal judgment that he should have known better than to make. He paid the back taxes, served no prison time, and resumed his career. The episode is part of the honest profile.

What Williams leaves the working trader is a framework that has been continuously refined and tested for sixty years. The frameworks themselves are accessible. The books are still in print. The indicators are free. The COT data is publicly available. The seasonality patterns are documented. Most of what made Larry Williams the all-time record holder in futures trading is sitting in plain view, available to any trader willing to do the work.

The 1987 result was not magic. It was the visible peak of twenty-five years of preparation, applied at a moment when the conditions and the framework were aligned. The trader who learns to identify those moments, even at retail scale, has access to the same arithmetic that built Legendary Larry.

“Markets are always right, you won’t be, so run stops.” — Larry Williams

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Larry Williams?

Larry Richard Williams is an American futures trader, author, and educator. Born on 6 October 1942 in Miles City, Montana, he began trading in 1962 and has now been actively trading for over six decades. He created the Williams %R indicator in 1966, won the 1987 World Cup Championship of Futures Trading with an all-time record return of 11,376%, has authored eleven books on trading, and has trained thousands of students including multiple subsequent World Cup winners. He is the father of Oscar-nominated actress Michelle Williams.

What was Larry Williams’ 1987 World Cup result?

Williams entered the 1987 Robbins World Cup Championship of Futures Trading with $10,000 in real money. Twelve months later he had turned it into $1,137,600, a return of 11,376%. The result is the all-time record in the championship and has not been beaten in nearly forty years despite thousands of subsequent entrants. Williams has said in interviews that he reduced risk dramatically near the end of the year because the championship was already won, and that he could have finished at over 20,000% had he continued pressing.

What is the Williams %R indicator?

The Williams %R is a momentum oscillator Larry Williams created in 1966 to identify overbought and oversold conditions in markets. It compares the most recent closing price to the high-low range over a specified lookback period, producing a value between 0 and -100. Values near 0 indicate the market is near its recent highs (potentially overbought), while values near -100 indicate the market is near its recent lows (potentially oversold). The Williams %R is now standard in every major charting platform including TradingView, MetaTrader, ThinkOrSwim, and NinjaTrader.

What is Williams’ approach to the COT report?

Williams was the first major futures trader to systematically use the Commitment of Traders (COT) report as a primary trading input. The COT report is a weekly CFTC publication detailing aggregate positioning by commercial hedgers, large speculators, and small speculators. Williams developed a series of COT indices that normalize commercial positioning across time, allowing traders to identify when commercial hedgers (typically the most informed participants) reach extreme positioning levels. His COT framework has since become a standard tool in futures trading.

What happened with Larry Williams and the IRS?

Williams stopped filing federal income tax returns in the 1990s based on his interpretation that the law’s ambiguities did not require him to file. The IRS investigated, and he was eventually charged with three counts of tax evasion for tax years 1999, 2000, and 2001. On 5 February 2010, the IRS dropped the felony tax evasion charges in exchange for Williams pleading guilty to three misdemeanor counts of failing to file timely tax returns. He paid the back taxes plus penalties, served no prison time, and has subsequently described his original legal position as naive. He discussed the case publicly on the NPR Planet Money podcast in 2018.

Who is Larry Williams’ daughter?

Larry Williams’ daughter is Michelle Williams, the four-time Academy Award-nominated and one-time Tony Award-nominated American actress. In 1997, exactly ten years after her father set the all-time World Cup Championship record with 11,376%, Michelle Williams entered the same contest and won it with a 1,000% return. The father-daughter accomplishment is unique in the history of the championship. Michelle has gone on to a major film career while Larry has continued teaching and trading.

What books did Larry Williams write?

Williams has authored eleven books, primarily on stocks and commodity trading. Notable titles include How I Made One Million Dollars Last Year Trading Commodities (1979), Sure Thing Commodity Trading: How Seasonal Factors Influence Commodity Prices (1987, the first book ever on seasonality in stock and futures markets), The Definitive Guide to Futures Trading Volumes I and II (1988), Long-Term Secrets to Short-Term Trading (Wiley 1998), and Trade Stocks and Commodities With the Insiders: Secrets of the COT Report (Wiley 2005). Most of his books are still in print and have been continuously selling for decades.

Does Larry Williams still trade?

Yes. As of 2026, Williams is 83 years old and still actively trading, publishing, and teaching. He releases annual market forecasts that are followed by traders in over sixty countries. He continues to update his frameworks as markets evolve. He maintains an educational platform at ireallytrade.com, where he publishes COT indicator data, eSignal indicators, and trading resources. He is reportedly the only futures trader in the world to have publicly traded one million dollars of his own money live at seminars around the globe.