“Since he has to do trading from wherever he is dancing he ignores tips, financial stories and brokers’ letters, and has never been in a broker’s office. Basically, his approach is that of a chartist: he watches price and volume … When a stock makes a good advance on strong volume, he begins watching it, buys when he feels that informed buyers are getting in. For example, when he was playing in Calcutta, he noticed E. L. Bruce moving up in the stock tables. Suddenly, on 35,000 shares it moved from 16 to 50. He bought in at 51, though he knew nothing about the company, and ‘I didn’t care what they made.’ (They make hardwood flooring.) He sold out at 171 six weeks later.

Darvas places his buy orders for levels that he considers breakout points on the upside. At the same time, he places a stop-loss sell order just below his buy order, so that if the stock does not move straight up after he buys, he will be sold out and his loss cut. ‘I have no ego in the stock market,’ he says. ‘If I make a mistake I admit it immediately and get out fast.’ Darvas thinks his system is the height of conservatism … If he has a big profit in a stock, he puts the stop-loss order just below the level at which a sliding stock should meet support. He bought Universal Controls at 18, sold it at 83 on the way down after it had hit 102.

Darvas trained for the market just as methodically as he had studied his dancing, read some 200 books on the market and the great speculators, spent eight hours a day until saturated. Two of the books he rereads almost every week: Humphrey Neill’s Tape Reading and Market Tactics and G. M. Loeb’s The Battle for Investment Survival. He still spends about two hours a day on his stock tables.”