Williams was born on October 6, 1942 in Miles City, Montana, the son of Sylva Berthea and Richard Sigwart Williams. He is of Welsh, Norwegian, German, and English ancestry. In 1960, he graduated from Billings High School, in Billings, Montana, where he was active in sports, on the all-state football team, and the sports editor of the school paper. He is a graduate of the School of Journalism, class of 1964 at the University of Oregon in Eugene. Williams was a member of Alpha Delta Sigma while at Oregon and served as national president. He is also a member of Sigma Chi at the University of Oregon and received the fraternity's highest national award, "Significant Sig", along with Andy Rooney, Brad Pitt, and many other notable members. Williams was one of the founders of the "Rock and Roll Marathons" that have raised in excess of $320 million for charities throughout the world.
Career
Williams is the author of 11 books, most on stocks and commodity trading. Other books include The Mount Sinai Myth, based on an archeological search for Mount Sinai in Egypt. This book was featured in Vanity Fair in a rewrite by Howard Blum. 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. Williams funds 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 a high grade point average." 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 in a 12-month competition with real money. Ten years later, his daughter, actress Michelle Wiliams, won the same contest. In November 2014, at the Traders Expo in Las Vegas, Larry Williams recorded a series of four videos discussing his 50+ years of trading. Williams' son, psychiatrist Jason Williams, has written a book on the personality of winning traders, The Mental Edge in Trading.
Politics
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, and then lost to Democratic U.S. Representative Max Baucus in the general election by 160,353 votes to 127,589. In 1982, he defeated attorney Willie Dee Morris in the primary by 49,615 votes to 6,696, and was then defeated in the general election by incumbent Democratic U.S. Senator John Melcher by 174,861 votes to 133,789. He sponsored Initiative 86, which made Montana the first state to index tax brackets for inflation.
