It's a zero sum game. If you trade like the many you will lose. MG traded like the many. A move such as the crude decline is not necessarily a big deal, trends occur all the time in commodities markets, this time was different. There is always someone else on the other side of a futures position.
Difficulty lies in determining who is on the opposite side of a position if one side is known.
The Turtles played the hand in MG's defeat. Richard Dennis' hand picked group of trainees, now on their own, left a performance trail of their activities over the course of 1993. There is slight variation in performance data due to differing levels of leverage employed by the Turtles, but the key to the explanation lies in the months of July 93, December 93 and January 94. Those 3 months don't require much more than eyeball correlation to judge the similarity in technique employed. They all made money in July and December and all lost in January.