How I Made $2,000,000 in the Stock Market Paperback – September 8, 2011

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The Author described his situation so well and with such enthusiasm. It was genuinely surprising to me that he had experienced many things as a new Trader in the 1950’s that I experienced this year in 2025!! Some things never change, I guess.I was shocked by all the amazing things this man was able to do in the 1950’s!!! I think he got lucky his whole life. He got paid to travel the world and dance AND he made an unbelievable amount of money in the stock market!!

“How I Made $2,000,000 in the Stock Market” is exactly the kind of book I needed at this stage in my trading journey. It’s clear, practical, and packed with timeless principles that resonate deeply with real market experience. I’ll be adopting many of the strategies and mindset shifts outlined in the book. Highly recommended for anyone serious about growing as a trader.

I have a very special place in my heart for any book with "million" in its title. Perhaps this sum speaks to the greedy little capitalist in me. At the same time, my higher brain functions always kick in, and always being skeptical and somewhat leery of such tomes, I have to ask aloud, "OK, where's the gank (scam) here?"As it turns out, there is no catch, no scam in Darvas's delightful and entertaining little book on how he, by himself, stumbled upon an oft-tried (and somewhat true) trading strategy through admittedly much trial and much more error. Nowadays, I believe those in the know refer to it as momentum investing, but Darvas is arguably the first person who put the basic method on paper for the lay person to follow. Since he first published his book, there have been many imitators and would-be pretenders to the throne, such as Get Your Share: A Guide to Striking It Rich in the Stock Market, but none of these challengers has written a book as entertaining, accessible and straight-forward as this one.Withhout giving too much away, the book presents a method that pursues capital gain and relies heavily on the use of automatic buy and sell orders as a kind of insurance policy against catastrophic losses. As a precursor for using the method, one has to look for rising trends in a given stock, both in its price and trading volume. Truthfully, I found the narrative surrounding how he stumbled upon this simple and straight-forward (but difficult to successfully execute!) method more interesting and enlightening than the method itself.Potential readers and careful, thoughtful students of the market should take note of the following merits and demerits of the text. First, those of us who are fans of fundamental analysis are out of luck here; Darvas dismisses this pursuit as fool-hardy. Second, those of you who are fans of technical analysis (you FOOLS- shows where my bias resides, doesn't it?) will find precious little vindication within its pages. Darvas also basically dismisses technical analysis out of hand. Indeed, Darvas does not have very many kind words for securities analysts of all stripes- be they technicians or fundamentalists, and through carefully recorded experiences as his technique slowly evolved, he gradually develops a well-deserved contempt for hot tips (and the tipsters), the advisory rags, brokers and the casual musings of insiders and the so-called 'knowledge-able people' in business on where to invest. Finally, perhaps of greatest importance to those looking to use this method and maybe tweaking or modifying it is this: it apparently misses more often than it hits. Given the very real and crushing effects of transaction costs and taxes, one's grubstake can potentially suffer 'death by a thousand cuts'- a total capital loss inflicted by numerous small losses along the way. I heartily encourage non-believers to grab a copy of the book, and see for yourselves.Admittedly, trading costs and capital gains taxes were much greater in his day, but then, trading volumes were smaller and volatility, as measured among individual shares and by the broader market, was much more muted. Basically, after reviewing his trading record, one can clearly see that it relies on a few big hits to cover up many small misses. Plus, according to him, it requires hours of poring through lots of boring stock tables filled with numbers, making lots of charts, and most unpleasant for me, daily communication with one's broker. It all sounds like a lot of activity for maybe, possibly a big score, over and above the demands of your day job (which in his case was the ever-strenuous professional dancing at night).In sum, I found the author's remarks on the markets very amusing. Moreover, I deemed quite a few of his hard-won and independently derived (but by no means original) insights very worthwhile. Many of the latter have support from no less than super-investors like Gerald Loeb, author of The Battle For Investment Survival, John Train, author of The Craft of Investing: Growth and Value Stocks * Emerging Markets * Funds * Retirement and Estate Planning and the various writings of Warren Buffett. This book deserves to be read, and the author gets my respect partly for its candor (he presents the full record of his trades, good and bad, in all their painful glory), partly for its wit and borderline uber-jaded sarcasm with regard to markets and brokers, but mostly because the author did the hard work of thinking and learning independently, doing things on his own, taking his lumps with honesty, clarity and grace, and best of all, admitting his basic humanity (laying bare his foibles, his misguided arrogance in the face of the market and his fool-hardy notions). As such, he has about him the glimmerings of an unabashed, unrepentant contrarian.

Book was extremely helpful. Great stories on Darvas successful and losing investments and how he learned from each

I would rate this book as a solid 4 or 5, with the sole asterisk being to know what you are getting into. This is an incredibly conversational and personal book from someone who, while claiming to have read a great deal on his own, is not exactly selling a system and does not claim to have any certified or official education.He first talks about just fundamentals and his go at that, but he says that even a stock that looks great from that standpoint can fall immediately and irreparably, as many of us have no doubt found to be the case. He then talks about technical analysis, combining price momentum and irregular volume, similar to those such as Mark Minervini and William O'Neil. Also similar to them is the fact that he clings to stop-losses to force him to sell; unlike them, he often keeps these stop-losses tighter than 8%, but then at other times can give over 10%, depending on the stock. Like them, he also tries to identify buy-points, but it sounds less like he believes it's an iron-clad "this is the exact buy-point" system. Instead he talks about boxes, which sound like small troughs or even bases within a tight range of between 5 and 15%. Also, similar to at least Minervini, every successful stock owned by Darvas had already increased at least 100% within the prior year (although he does not point this out--I noticed it--and it was never claimed to be part of his system, whereas Minervini himself points it out).Lastly, as one reviewer pointed out, Darvas benefited from an option program that either does not occur anymore or certainly does not occur commonly, especially for someone not looking for it, and further, he embraced the margin. As I recall, margin has been embraced by O'Neil and Minervini, but many novice or cautious investors will not want to do that, even with capital-saving stop-losses. That is where the similarities end, though. O'Neil and Minervini go into much greater detail on earnings, earnings surprises, market direction, and numerous other things. Darvas seems to admit his focus on just a few small factors--namely, price momentum and rising volume. Beyond that, his tip is to not pay too much attention to your stocks or you'll freak out and do too much.One thing that I do have to credit this book for, which Minervini did well but O'Neil has not in any book of his that I have read, is to give the confidence to use stop-losses right. The point here is that Darvas admitted that even when you do everything right, you may be stopped out of a stock even the same day as buying it, and then you may still want to buy it after that. With some, the mentality seems to be, "well, you're getting stopped out and you aren't very good, but you're at least limiting how bad you are, so that's something." Here, the mentality is more, "these things don't always work and your charge is to follow your system. If it rises, raise your stop in time. If it falls, then you're just following the rules. Good."