I know it works at times at times because my father did it in the first half of his retirement. may dad made 4 to 5 million off of an 800,000 account in his retirement. he read IBD every day. and watched the market every morning for about 3 hours. In retrospect he matched his trading system to the way the market was working at the time in the 90s and early 2000s. his last strategy seemed to swing trade or stat arb on a small portifolio of ibd IBD 100 stocks. (there were 100 back then) (he also made money by buying funds was they were starting to trend up.) prior to that he made money buying break outs in IBD stocks when that worked. He seemed to have enough money and enough guts to make trades and naturally figure out what was working at that point in the game. He had a passion and a competitive drive for it like few others. He also had nerves. he loved his life trading for about 15 years but he did get taken out by esophageal cancer. I am sure that the market had something to do with that. I am also sure the overall bull market had a lot to do with it too. But, he matched strategies to the market as the market did different things.
Darvas had a good DNA to attempt to succeed in the stock market. He made most his money, as I recall, on very large, very few bets where he maximized his profit. Percent of winning trades was not his thing as he was brutal about taking his stops. He was all about momentum /trend and dependence on its continuance. He dropped sexy illiquid stocks for big boys in a bull market as he progresses. Similar, maybe today to sme in the semi conductor space. I dont know if the book is accurate but it is KISS method and discipline.
I daytraded for a living off a small small account for about 7 years. But, when I started having a family and market volatility dried up at that time... I ceased trading short term. My mom has my Dad's money and she spends a portion of it every year as she should. not much of it is invested. Hopefully, in the future I will have my own big pile of money and be able to watch the market and trade instead of work. But with 4 kids... that may not happen soon.
To make a living daytrading...you need to throw conventional wisdom out the door...and really embrace the concept of Risk, and likewise...the potentially available following Reward. and you need to be an expert killer to do so. Risking only 1 or 2% of your account per trade is laughable. and will get you absolutely nowhere. Most people approach trading like a Darts game. But instead of only 3 darts...they throw 30 or 300 darts blindly...Hoping one dart randomly hits the Target. -- Be the Opposite of that dumb strategy. Be the True Outlier from that brain dead, skill-less bunch. The general, bottom line game to daytrading...and ideally...making a boatload of money...is to grow and compound your trades and account daily. and that requires strategizing, and having balls and skill and all-around market wisdom, All of this is certainly possible. -- But not easy, otherwise every fool would become a millionaire in the market. This is not to say or imply though you need to be a supernatural genius to succeed in the market trading. All you need is common sense street smarts, and people smarts, and book smarts, and market smarts...all in varying degrees and ratios everyday. 2018 ET, High-Five` ,
I read this book about 13 years ago. It's basically buying breakouts. They key to reaching $2M so fast wasn't that he bought at the right time, but if you read it through, then you'll see that his position size on each trade was massive. If he believed in a breakout, he would put more than 50% of his account into it at times. There was one (E.L. Bruce I believe) where I kept buying it up using options too until his position size was huge. It was almost like he zoned into one breakout and concentrated on entry points all the way up. We're taught to spread our account over 3-4 positions at the very least, and even more than that to limit our exposure into one stock. I highly doubt any of use can go that route anymore, because we're taught differently. I have trouble putting more than 10% of my account into 1 position. The book was a good read for me.
what you need is a robust process, an approach that has a high likelihood of producing positive returns over time. most people don’t have that and they are either unaware of that or chose to ignore it.
Linda Bradford Raschke has said no one making substantial money in the markets writes a book. [/QUOTE]