Gary Savage has been a long-time Sloper is is one of the original folks on my favorite trading sites page. He posted a charming story last night that I think has a lesson for us all; I am posting it here with his blessing.
Nicolas Darvas was a professional dancer who turned $8,000 into $2,000,000. How he did it makes a fascinating story for anyone interested in investing. I won't go into details, I'll just let you read the book, but basically Nicolas found a system he was comfortable with (his box theory) and then had the discipline to follow his system. Actually his system is the least interesting thing about the book. What I found so intriguing was the fact that Nicolas spent most of his time overseas working as a dancer. He couldn't even get daily stock quotes. He would have his broker send him the Wall Street Journal once a week. That's right, he only looked at the market once a week.
Now here's what was really interesting. As long as Nicolas was working overseas and away from Wall Street with only limited information he consistently made money. Actually he made money hand over fist. However at one point in his career he decided to go to New York so he could be in the middle of the action. Any guesses as to what happened once he made this change? That's right he immediately started to lose money. Watching the day to day tape caused his emotions to wreck havoc with his discipline and started costing him money right off the bat.
It wasn't until he went back to Europe and back to his dancing career that he started making money again. I believe it was Bernard Baruch who said that the most money he ever made was when he went on vacation and couldn't watch the market. Folks, the day to day moves in the market are often meaningless noise. It's much easier to see what's really going on by taking a step back and looking at the big picture. I suspect that 99% of us are going to make a lot more money by watching the market a hell of a lot less.
I confess that if I didn't write this report every day I probably wouldn't look at the market for weeks at a time. In my opinion it's a total waste of my time and energy watching the sheep push and pull the market back and forth every day.
