Category: Trading Legends

Nicolas Darvas (1920–1977) was a self-taught investor and author. He is best known for his book, “How I Made $2,000,000 in the Stock Market.”

Career

Dancer

Hungarian by birth, Darvas trained as an economist at the University of Budapest. Reluctant to remain in Hungary until either the Nazis or the Soviet Union took over, he fled in June 1943 at the age of 23 with a forged exit visa and fifty pounds sterling to Istanbul, Turkey. Sometime later, he met up with his half-sister Julia. who became his partner in a dancing team in Europe and the United States.

In April 1953 the two appeared with Judy Garland and Bob Hope. By 1956, they were touring.

 

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J. Welles Wilder Jr. (Born in 1930s ) is an American mechanical engineer, turned real estate developer, turned technical analyst, best known for his work in technical analysis. He commenced 13 years of full-time market research and trading in his “retirement.” He became interested in buying silver, and concluded that futures were the best way to gain leverage. He embarked to study and learn all he could about futures markets.

Wilder is the father of several technical indicators that are now considered to be core indicators in technical analysis software. These include Average True Range, the Relative Strength Index (RSI), Average Directional Index, and the Parabolic SAR.

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Perry J. Kaufman is an American systematic trader, index developer, and quantitative financial theorist. He is considered a leading expert in the development of fully algorithmic trading programs.

Career

Kaufman currently serves as the president of Kaufman Analytics, Ltd. He received a BS in Mathematics from the University of Wisconsin and a MBA from the New York Institute of Technology.

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Richard Demille Wyckoff (November 2, 1873 – March 19, 1934) was a stock market authority, founder and onetime editor of the Magazine of Wall Street (founding it in 1907), and editor of Stock Market Technique.

Wyckoff implemented his methods in the financial markets, and grew his account such that he eventually owned nine and a half acres and a mansion next door to the General Motors’ Industrialist, Alfred Sloan Estate, in Great Neck, New York (Hamptons).

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Philip L. Carret was born in 1896, the only child of a lawyer and a social worker. Although his parents had a good income, they weren’t very adept at managing money and Carret decided at the age of 16 that “if I were ever to gain wealth, it would have to be by my own efforts”, according to his book, A Money Mind at 90. In 1924, aged 28, he started to invest money for family and friends, who saw that he had a knack for finding winning stocks. He frequently ignored Wall Street analysts and researched companies himself, reading extensively. Frank Betz, who was Carret’s personal assistant in the Eighties, recalled that he read voraciously – not just corporate reports and newspapers but also books on philosophy, history, economics and biographies. Carret claimed to glean the most useful information from the detailed footnotes appended to corporate annual reports.

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