"Dan Zanger holds the world record for one-year stock market portfolio appreciation, gaining over 29,000%. In around two years, he turned $11,000 into $42 million." $11,000 into $42,000,000 is a return of 381,818% With better liquidity today and access to more leveraged products has anyone beaten his record ? Or at least his one year 29,000% return ?
No, because we do not have the ridiculousness of the 1998-2000 era dot.com bubble and mass amounts of dumb money fueling it.
I started trading, about 1 month before that bubble burst, remember logging on at a clients on 56K and seeing the market down HUGE, thankfully my position was pretty much okay, dumped it, bought another position which was down 50% area, rebounded back for +50% in 30mins, sold it, good day Every man with a computer and a 56K or maybe 1mb ADSL line was at it, it was literally to easy!!
That percentage return record is kind of impossible to beat. His scenario was truly a perfect storm -- right guy, right place, right time, etc etc etc
Riskarb posted about a colleague who took something like $20k to >$100MM trading exotic options. Legendary.
You're right. Options are a powerful thing. Dan Zanger made that astronomical return by trading stock -- stocks are tame. Had he traded options in that period instead...:eek:
Don't quote me on this, but I recall him saying that his colleague's returns were in terrible equity markets - nothing even imaginably close to the dot com bust. Mid 2000s I think? I'd have to search but I need sleep.
"In around two years, he turned $11,000 into $42 million." I have always felt there was a bit of falsity to this story. In fact he had been trading for something like 20 years prior to this run, if i recall correctly (might not). The real Q might be why after 20 years of trading did he only have 11k in his account. Still a great achievement though in terms of trading runs for the record books.
The story was that he inherited 100k from his mom and an it up to 400k then lost it all. Sold his car for the 11000 and started trading again.
Rumor had it he sold a hundreds of tickle me elmos on ebay from his basement. Netted 11K...the rest is history!