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

“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'm new to investing and trading, I will admit it, I've been doing it for a few months now, and I started with only a thousand dollars, even though Darvas once said that if you don't have five thousand you shouldn't even step in--though I'd say that was probably because the cost of the commission made it so much more difficult. I've read this book four times, once out loud to my mother who has also opened an account, and used this strategy with William O'Neil's CANSLIM to start growing her retirement, already up five thousand from the twenty thousand account she opened.This book helped me spot stocks like FUQI at ten to fifteen, STEC at twenty. I had lost five hundred dollars of my thousand before I found this book and started reading it, with it, I was able to use it to catch the trend upwards on Borders Group and ALD from April to May which turned my five hundred into twelve hundred. Through a series of stocks, I'm up to nearly three thousand, I also put a little money in the account, about a hundred and twenty, for full disclosure, but this book is excellent. I understood it right off the bat, and along with William O'Neil, I have been very profitable. I bought fifty shares of STEC it up to thirty four, FUQI is up to twenty five and I bought a hundred shares of that. I'm up to nearly five thousand dollars. This small bull market has been doing me great, and I've been prospering in it, making sure to keep my stop losses reasonably close so not to give back all my profits. I have taken a lot of losses, nearly fifteen hundred dollars worth of losses, but I've always made that back with my winners. I was trading small cap until I had a good deal of money, and used to get stopped out at thirty five cents daily.This book should be required reading for anyone considering getting into stocks, its an uplifting story, its entertaining, its fun, it lets you get a good look into the work it takes to become very profitable in the stock market.The rules I come away from with this book are simple.1: You're going to be wrong half the time if not more, so always make sure you cut your losses.2: Only buy into rising stocks.3: Use volume, new products, earning growth, and price to decide if the stock is about to move.4: Never listen to the news or analysts, they're human and can be just as wrong as you, and their information is usually late and of no use.5: Annual Reports and Company Records mean nothing about the companies future.I've used these rules and I plan to keep using these rules. This is an excelent book, and at 8.99,7.99, its too cheap not to buy.

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.