Larry R. Williams

In November 2014, at the Traders Expo in Las Vegas, Larry Williams recorded a series of four videos discussing his 50+ years of trading. In 2018, he appeared as a guest on the NPR economics podcast, Planet Money to discuss the story of his tax protest, extradition and trial.

Confessions of a Radical Tax Protestor discusses his battle with the Internal Revenue Service, which led to a trial on three charges of tax evasion. On February 5, 2010, those charges were dropped and he pleaded guilty to three misdemeanor charges of failing to file income tax returns on time (for tax years 1999, 2000, and 2001).

Williams has created numerous market indicators, including Williams %R, Ultimate Oscillator, COT indices, accumulation/distribution indicators, cycle forecasts, market sentiment, and value measurements for commodity prices. Williams won the 1987 World Cup Championship of Futures Trading from the Robbins Trading Company, where he turned $10,000 to over $1,100,000 (11,300%) in a 12-month competition with real money. Ten years later, his daughter, actress Michelle Williams, won the same contest. Williams' son, psychiatrist Jason Williams, has written a book on the personality of winning traders, The Mental Edge in Trading.

Williams was twice the Republican Party nominee to the United States Senate in Montana. In 1978, he defeated Bill Osborne and Clancy Rich in the Republican primary with 35,479 votes (62%), and then lost to Democratic U.S. Representative Max Baucus in the general election by 160,353 votes (56%) to 127,589 (44%). In 1982, he defeated attorney Willie Dee Morris in the primary by 49,615 votes (88%) to 6,696 (12%), and was then defeated in the general election by incumbent Democratic U.S. Senator John Melcher by 174,861 votes (55%) to 133,789 (42%).

Larry Richard Williams (born October 6, 1942) is an American author, stock and commodity trader, and 1970s–80s political candidate in the state of Montana. He is the father of actress Michelle Williams.

Williams was born on October 6, 1942, in Miles City, Montana, the son of Sylva Berthea (née Brurs) and Richard Sigwart Williams. He is of Welsh, Norwegian, German, and English ancestry. In 1960, he graduated from Billings High School, in Billings, Montana. He is a graduate of the School of Journalism, class of 1964 at the University of Oregon in Eugene. He was a member of Alpha Delta Sigma (honorary professional fraternity) while at Oregon and served as national president. .