Nicolas Darvas

Books

• How I Made $2,000,000 in the Stock Market:
  During his off hours as a dancer, he read some 200 books on the market and the great speculators, spending as much as eight hours a day studying.Darvas ploughed his money into a couple of stocks that had been hitting their 52-week high. He was utterly surprised that the stocks continued to rise and subsequently sold them to make a large profit. His main source of stock selection was Barron's Magazine. At the age of 39, after accumulating his fortune, Darvas documented his techniques in the book, How I Made 2,000,000 in the Stock Market. The book describes his unique "Box System", which he used to buy and sell stocks. Darvas' book remains a classic stock market text to this day.

• Wall Street The Other Las Vegas:
  From the book: Page 144 stating "the only stocks which would be of any interest to me would be those that were breaking all previous records: stocks not merely rising in price, but actually in their highest boxes ever." Page 149 he mentions how he searched for potential stocks: he scanned for those stocks with a high that at least doubled the low for the year. He then started looked at those that were within a few points of the high. Later on that page he notes "I then subjected them to further tests, but these were largely dependant on judgement and no absolute rules could be laid down for them." These boiled down to what he called his Techno-Fundamentalist method relying on volume, breakouts, "story" and expected earnings.