How I Made $2 Million in the Stock Market. Nicolas Darvas
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those modernistic telephone booths at Kennedy International Airport. A few feet away stood Charlie Stein with a beautiful girl.
Charlie is president of the Lord Hardwick Corporation. He always has a beautiful girl at his side. And he seems to take special delight in introducing me to the girls and praising me in such a way that it somehow makes him more important because he knows me!
There are usually no dividends for me in this upmanship, but today was no usual day. For, unseen by all of us, was another beautiful girl. She was invisible, and she stood nearby. Call her Lady Luck or call her Dame Circumstance.
Thus, for the first time, Charlie’s use of me proved useful to me. For it prompted the reissue of this book.
While I was trying to reach my girlfriend in Paris on the phone and deciding that she was probably out cheating on me – Charlie proceeded with his usual build-up of Nicolas Darvas. He kept repeating my name and, as always, he was loud. A stranger in the next phone booth stepped out and said to him, “Is that fellow really Darvas? I studied his book like a chemistry text and – would you believe it – I’ve already made more than one hundred thousand dollars with what I applied from what he wrote!”
I stepped out of the booth, and the stranger turned to me. “Why the hell is How I Made . . . out of print?”
He didn’t wait for my answer. “I bought more than a dozen copies,” he continued, “but now I can’t seem to get another at any price. My only remaining copy is constantly being borrowed. Then I have to beg my friends to return it. They eventually do. But by now the book is in shambles.”
The stranger held out his hand. “I want to thank you,” he said. “I’ve got to catch a plane or I’d buy you a dinner or some drinks. I want to tell you something. You might have made two million in the stock market, but you wouldn’t make two cents in the publishing business!”
With that he grabbed my hand, did a swivel turn, and was racing toward a departure gate.
Then it hit me. I was dumb. Here, a decade later, I was still receiving a steady flow of mail in response to my book. Again and again, readers asked for clarification of certain points. Most of the questions were along the same lines. And the book was out of print!
Time has a way with it. And time had proved out my approach to stock market speculation. My book had become a classic that was, in some cases, bringing as much as $20 a copy in the “out of print” book market.
Had I been extraordinarily lucky? Had I been caught in the momentum of a runaway bull market in which even a fool could do no wrong? Or was my approach so sound that it would work in almost any market?
The fact is that How I Made . . . has withstood the careful scrutiny of time.
I went from the airport to the Park Avenue South office of Lyle Stuart. He had published my second book, Wall Street: The Other Las Vegas. He was a fellow with guts and one willing to take a gamble. But when I mentioned the possibility of putting How I Made… back in print, he assured me that that was no gamble at all. After a brief discussion, we decided that we would publish the original book without changing a word. The book was a classic. There was no point in updating it. An estimated one million people had read it. And it had had such an impact that it forced one exchange, the American, to alter its rules on stop-loss orders. The “powers that be” were so upset about the book that they managed to persuade the attorney general of New York State to make some wild charges against it – charges which he later quietly withdrew. (He shouted the charges, but he barely whispered the withdrawal!)
Yes, we would leave the book exactly as it was first published. But we would add some of the many questions that have come in from readers, and I would answer them. You will find this addition at the back of the book.
Obviously I am replying only to the questions most frequently asked. But here I want to tell you about one letter that contained no questions at all. Rather, it was a reprimand.
A reader of the book pointed out, with pages of data, that I had “missed the gold mine.” He insisted that, had I hired two full-time assistants and applied my system over a two-year period, I could have had a return of 3,000 times my original investment ($36,000) – or $100,000,000 instead of a mere $2,250,000 in 18 months.
The fault, said this reader, is that I failed to take advantage of high velocity movements and of margin. I failed too, he said, to reinvest my profits.
This, of course, is all hindsight. With the letter were detailed charts proving the case. Could I have made 140 times my capital in the 18 months? 200 times? 1,000 times?
Perhaps. But I have never been unhappy with what I did accomplish. I built a fortune with serenity by avoiding premature selling yet making an exodus from most of my stocks with the use of a single tool: the trailing stop-loss.
I have discovered no loss-free Nirvana. But I have been able to limit my losses, without compromise, to less than 10 percent wherever possible. Profits are a function of time, and so good reasons have to exist to keep a profitless purchase longer than three weeks.
My stop-loss method had two effects. It got me out of the wrong stock and onto the right one. And it did it quickly. My method obviously wouldn’t work for everyone. It worked for me. And, by studying what I did, I hope you find this book helpful and profitable for you.
Nicolas Darvas
Paris, February, 1971
In the morning of September 3, 1958, the following cable arrived at the Gloucester Hotel in the Crown Colony of Hong Kong:
“BOUGHT 1300 THIOKOL 49.875 . . .’‘
This purchase represented one part of a chain of purchases that were to net $2,000,000 in eighteen months.
And this is the story of the events that led up to it . . .
Chapter one: Canadian Period
It was November 1952. I was playing in Manhattan’s “Latin Quarter” in New York when my agent telephoned. He had received an offer for me and my dancing partner, Julia, to appear in a Toronto nightclub. This was owned by twin brothers, Al and Harry Smith, who made me a very unusual proposition. They offered to pay me in stock instead of money. I have had some strange experiences in show business, but this was a new one.
I made further inquiries and found they were prepared to give me 6,000 shares in a company called BRILUND. This was a Canadian mining firm in which they were interested. The stock at that time was quoted at 50 cents a share.
I knew stocks went up and down – that was about all I did know – so I asked the Smith brothers if they would give me the following guarantee: if the stock went below 50 cents they would make up the difference. They agreed to do this for a period of six months.
It so happened that I could not keep that Toronto date. I felt badly about letting the brothers down, so I offered to buy the stock as a gesture. I sent them a check for $3,000 and received 6,000 shares of BRILUND stock.
I thought no more about it until one day, two months later, I idly glanced at the stock’s price in the paper. I shot upright in my chair. My 50-cent BRILUND stock was quoted at $1.90. I sold it at once and made a profit of close to $8,000.
At first I could not believe it. It was like magic to me. I felt like the man who went to the races for the first time and with beginner’s luck backed every winner. Cashing his winnings he simply inquired: “How long has this been going on?”
I decided I had been missing a good thing all my life. I made up my mind to go into the stock market. I have never gone back on this decision, but little did I know what problems I would encounter in this unknown jungle.
I knew absolutely nothing about the stock market. I was not even aware, for instance, that there was one in New York. All I had heard about were Canadian stocks, particularly